You have learned what paternal patience is, and you let no opportunity slip of proving it.  Your countenance, therefore, is serious.

By your side is a domestic, evidently for two purposes like the carriage.  The vehicle is four-wheeled and hung upon English springs:  it is corpulent and resembles a Rouen scow:  it has glass windows, and an infinity of economical arrangements.  It is a barouche in fine weather, and a brougham when it rains.  It is apparently light, but, when six persons are in it, it is heavy and tires out your only horse.

On the back seat, spread out like flowers, is your young wife in full bloom, with her mother, a big marshmallow with a great many leaves.  These two flowers of the female species twitteringly talk of you, though the noise of the wheels and your attention to the horse, joined to your fatherly caution, prevent you from hearing what they say.

On the front seat, there is a nice tidy nurse holding a little girl in her lap:  by her side is a boy in a red plaited shirt, who is continually leaning out of the carriage and climbing upon the cushions, and who has a thousand times drawn down upon himself those declarations of every mother, which he knows to be threats and nothing else:  “Be a good boy, Adolphe, or else—­” “I declare I’ll never bring you again, so there!”

His mamma is secretly tired to death of this noisy little boy:  he has provoked her twenty times, and twenty times the face of the little girl asleep has calmed her.

“I am his mother,” she says to herself.  And so she finally manages to keep her little Adolphe quiet.

You have put your triumphant idea of taking your family to ride into execution.  You left your home in the morning, all the opposite neighbors having come to their windows, envying you the privilege which your means give you of going to the country and coming back again without undergoing the miseries of a public conveyance.  So you have dragged your unfortunate Norman horse through Paris to Vincennes, from Vincennes to Saint Maur, from Saint Maur to Charenton, from Charenton opposite some island or other which struck your wife and mother-in-law as being prettier than all the landscapes through which you had driven them.

“Let’s go to Maison’s!” somebody exclaims.

So you go to Maison’s, near Alfort.  You come home by the left bank of the Seine, in the midst of a cloud of very black Olympian dust.  The horse drags your family wearily along.  But alas! your pride has fled, and you look without emotion upon his sunken flanks, and upon two bones which stick out on each side of his belly.  His coat is roughened by the sweat which has repeatedly come out and dried upon him, and which, no less than the dust, has made him gummy, sticky and shaggy.  The horse looks like a wrathy porcupine:  you are afraid he will be foundered, and you caress him with the whip-lash in a melancholy way that he perfectly understands, for he moves his head about like an omnibus horse, tired of his deplorable existence.