Axiom.—­Most men have some of the wit required by a difficult position, when they have not the whole of it.

As for those husbands who are not up to their situation, it is impossible to consider their case here:  without any struggle whatever they simply enter the numerous class of the Resigned.

Adolphe says to himself:  “Women are children:  offer them a lump of sugar, and you will easily get them to dance all the dances that greedy children dance; but you must always have a sugar plum in hand, hold it up pretty high, and—­take care that their fancy for sweetmeats does not leave them.  Parisian women—­and Caroline is one—­are very vain, and as for their voracity—­don’t speak of it.  Now you cannot govern men and make friends of them, unless you work upon them through their vices, and flatter their passions:  my wife is mine!”

Some days afterward, during which Adolphe has been unusually attentive to his wife, he discourses to her as follows: 

“Caroline, dear, suppose we have a bit of fun:  you’ll put on your new gown—­the one like Madame Deschars!—­and we’ll go to see a farce at the Varieties.”

This kind of proposition always puts a wife in the best possible humor.  So away you go!  Adolphe has ordered a dainty little dinner for two, at Borrel’s Rocher de Cancale.

“As we are going to the Varieties, suppose we dine at the tavern,” exclaims Adolphe, on the boulevard, with the air of a man suddenly struck by a generous idea.

Caroline, delighted with this appearance of good fortune, enters a little parlor where she finds the cloth laid and that neat little service set, which Borrel places at the disposal of those who are rich enough to pay for the quarters intended for the great ones of the earth, who make themselves small for an hour.

Women eat little at a formal dinner:  their concealed harness hampers them, they are laced tightly, and they are in the presence of women whose eyes and whose tongues are equally to be dreaded.  They prefer fancy eating to good eating, then:  they will suck a lobster’s claw, swallow a quail or two, punish a woodcock’s wing, beginning with a bit of fresh fish, flavored by one of those sauces which are the glory of French cooking.  France is everywhere sovereign in matters of taste:  in painting, fashions, and the like.  Gravy is the triumph of taste, in cookery.  So that grisettes, shopkeepers’ wives and duchesses are delighted with a tasty little dinner washed down with the choicest wines, of which, however, they drink but little, the whole concluded by fruit such as can only be had at Paris; and especially delighted when they go to the theatre to digest the little dinner, and listen, in a comfortable box, to the nonsense uttered upon the stage, and to that whispered in their ears to explain it.  But then the bill of the restaurant is one hundred francs, the box costs thirty, the carriage, dress, gloves, bouquet, as much more.  This gallantry amounts to the sum of one hundred and sixty francs, which is hard upon four thousand francs a month, if you go often to the Comic, the Italian, or the Grand, Opera.  Four thousand francs a month is the interest of a capital of two millions.  But then the honor of being a husband is fully worth the price!