O husbands!  Learn this fact; you may, at this fatal moment, repair and redeem everything:  and never does the impetuosity of lovers who have been caressing each other the whole evening with flaming gaze fail to do it!  Yes, you can bring her home in triumph, she has now nobody but you, you have one more chance, that of taking your wife by storm!  But no, idiot, stupid and indifferent that you are, you ask her, “What is the matter?”

Axiom.—­A husband should always know what is the matter with his wife, for she always knows what is not.

“I’m cold,” she says.

“The ball was splendid.”

“Pooh! nobody of distinction!  People have the mania, nowadays, to invite all Paris into a hole.  There were women even on the stairs:  their gowns were horribly smashed, and mine is ruined.”

“We had a good time.”

“Ah, you men, you play and that’s the whole of it.  Once married, you care about as much for your wives as a lion does for the fine arts.”

“How changed you are; you were so gay, so happy, so charming when we arrived.”

“Oh, you never understand us women.  I begged you to go home, and you left me there, as if a woman ever did anything without a reason.  You are not without intelligence, but now and then you are so queer I don’t know what you are thinking about.”

Once upon this footing, the quarrel becomes more bitter.  When you give your wife your hand to lift her from the carriage, you grasp a woman of wood:  she gives you a “thank you” which puts you in the same rank as her servant.  You understood your wife no better before than you do after the ball:  you find it difficult to follow her, for instead of going up stairs, she flies up.  The rupture is complete.

The chambermaid is involved in your disgrace:  she is received with blunt No’s and Yes’s, as dry as Brussells rusks, which she swallows with a slanting glance at you.  “Monsieur’s always doing these things,” she mutters.

You alone might have changed Madame’s temper.  She goes to bed; she has her revenge to take:  you did not comprehend her.  Now she does not comprehend you.  She deposits herself on her side of the bed in the most hostile and offensive posture:  she is wrapped up in her chemise, in her sack, in her night-cap, like a bale of clocks packed for the East Indies.  She says neither good-night, nor good-day, nor dear, nor Adolphe:  you don’t exist, you are a bag of wheat.

Your Caroline, so enticing five hours before in this very chamber where she frisked about like an eel, is now a junk of lead.  Were you the Tropical Zone in person, astride of the Equator, you could not melt the ice of this little personified Switzerland that pretends to be asleep, and who could freeze you from head to foot, if she liked.  Ask her one hundred times what is the matter with her, Switzerland replies by an ultimatum, like the Diet or the Conference of London.

Nothing is the matter with her:  she is tired:  she is going to sleep.