“But Caroline,” puts in the mother-in-law, “he’s doing the best he can.”

Nothing annoys you so much as to have your mother-in-law take your part.  She is a hypocrite and is delighted to see you quarreling with her daughter.  Gently and with infinite precaution she throws oil on the fire.

When you arrive at the barrier, your wife is mute.  She says not a word, she sits with her arms crossed, and will not look at you.  You have neither soul, heart, nor sentiment.  No one but you could have invented such a party of pleasure.  If you are unfortunate enough to remind Caroline that it was she who insisted on the excursion, that morning, for her children’s sake, and in behalf of her milk—­she nurses the baby—­you will be overwhelmed by an avalanche of frigid and stinging reproaches.

You bear it all so as “not to turn the milk of a nursing mother, for whose sake you must overlook some little things,” so your atrocious mother-in-law whispers in your ear.

All the furies of Orestes are rankling in your heart.

In reply to the sacramental words pronounced by the officer of the customs, “Have you anything to declare?” your wife says, “I declare a great deal of ill-humor and dust.”

She laughs, the officer laughs, and you feel a desire to tip your family into the Seine.

Unluckily for you, you suddenly remember the joyous and perverse young woman who wore a pink bonnet and who made merry in your tilbury six years before, as you passed this spot on your way to the chop-house on the river’s bank.  What a reminiscence!  Was Madame Schontz anxious about babies, about her bonnet, the lace of which was torn to pieces in the bushes?  No, she had no care for anything whatever, not even for her dignity, for she shocked the rustic police of Vincennes by the somewhat daring freedom of her style of dancing.

You return home, you have frantically hurried your Norman horse, and have neither prevented an indisposition of the animal, nor an indisposition of your wife.

That evening, Caroline has very little milk.  If the baby cries and if your head is split in consequence, it is all your fault, as you preferred the health of your horse to that of your son who was dying of hunger, and of your daughter whose supper has disappeared in a discussion in which your wife was right, as she always is.

“Well, well,” she says, “men are not mothers!”

As you leave the chamber, you hear your mother-in-law consoling her daughter by these terrible words:  “Come, be calm, Caroline:  that’s the way with them all:  they are a selfish lot:  your father was just like that!”

THE ULTIMATUM.

It is eight o’clock; you make your appearance in the bedroom of your wife.  There is a brilliant light.  The chambermaid and the cook hover lightly about.  The furniture is covered with dresses and flowers tried on and laid aside.

The hair-dresser is there, an artist par excellence, a sovereign authority, at once nobody and everything.  You hear the other domestics going and coming:  orders are given and recalled, errands are well or ill performed.  The disorder is at its height.  This chamber is a studio from whence to issue a parlor Venus.