“What! am I to have, like that fat Madame Deschars, cascades of flesh a la Rubens!  That Adolphe is an awful scoundrel.  Oh, I see, he wants to make me an old mother Gigogne, and destroy my powers of fascination!”

Thenceforward Caroline is willing to go to the opera, she accepts two seats in a box, but she considers it very distingue to eat sparingly, and declines the dainty dinners of her husband.

“My dear,” she says, “a well-bred woman should not go often to these places; you may go once for a joke; but as for making a habitual thing of it—­fie, for shame!”

Borrel and Very, those masters of the art, lose a thousand francs a day by not having a private entrance for carriages.  If a coach could glide under an archway, and go out by another door, after leaving its fair occupants on the threshold of an elegant staircase, how many of them would bring the landlord fine, rich, solid old fellows for customers!

Axiom.—­Vanity is the death of good living.

Caroline very soon gets tired of the theatre, and the devil alone can tell the cause of her disgust.  Pray excuse Adolphe!  A husband is not the devil.

Fully one-third of the women of Paris are bored by the theatre.  Many of them are tired to death of music, and go to the opera for the singers merely, or rather to notice the difference between them in point of execution.  What supports the theatre is this:  the women are a spectacle before and after the play.  Vanity alone will pay the exorbitant price of forty francs for three hours of questionable pleasure, in a bad atmosphere and at great expense, without counting the colds caught in going out.  But to exhibit themselves, to see and be seen, to be the observed of five hundred observers!  What a glorious mouthful! as Rabelais would say.

To obtain this precious harvest, garnered by self-love, a woman must be looked at.  Now a woman with her husband is very little looked at.  Caroline is chagrined to see the audience entirely taken up with women who are not with their husbands, with eccentric women, in short.  Now, as the very slight return she gets from her efforts, her dresses, and her attitudes, does not compensate, in her eyes, for her fatigue, her display and her weariness, it is very soon the same with the theatre as it was with the good cheer; high living made her fat, the theatre is making her yellow.

Here Adolphe—­or any other man in Adolphe’s place—­resembles a certain Languedocian peasant who suffered agonies from an agacin, or, in French, corn,—­but the term in Lanquedoc is so much prettier, don’t you think so?  This peasant drove his foot at each step two inches into the sharpest stones along the roadside, saying to the agacin, “Devil take you!  Make me suffer again, will you?”

“Upon my word,” says Adolphe, profoundly disappointed, the day when he receives from his wife a refusal, “I should like very much to know what would please you!”