“You made up this romance while I was talking to you!  Look me in the face!  I’ll go to see Braschon to-morrow.”

Adolphe cannot restrain a nervous shudder.

“You can’t help laughing, you monster!”

“I laugh at your obstinacy.”

“I’ll go to-morrow to Madame de Fischtaminel’s.”

“Oh, go wherever you like!”

“What brutality!” says Caroline, rising and going away with her handkerchief at her eyes.

The country house, so ardently longed for by Caroline, has now become a diabolical invention of Adolphe’s, a trap into which the fawn has fallen.

Since Adolphe’s discovery that it is impossible to reason with
Caroline, he lets her say whatever she pleases.

Two months after, he sells the villa which cost him twenty-two thousand francs for seven thousand!  But he gains this by the adventure—­he finds out that the country is not the thing that Caroline wants.

The question is becoming serious.  Nature, with its woods, its forests, its valleys, the Switzerland of the environs of Paris, the artificial rivers, have amused Caroline for barely six months.  Adolphe is tempted to abdicate and take Caroline’s part himself.

A HOUSEHOLD REVOLUTION.

One morning, Adolphe is seized by the triumphant idea of letting Caroline find out for herself what she wants.  He gives up to her the control of the house, saying, “Do as you like.”  He substitutes the constitutional system for the autocratic system, a responsible ministry for an absolute conjugal monarchy.  This proof of confidence —­the object of much secret envy—­is, to women, a field-marshal’s baton.  Women are then, so to speak, mistresses at home.

After this, nothing, not even the memory of the honey-moon, can be compared to Adolphe’s happiness for several days.  A woman, under such circumstances, is all sugar.  She is too sweet:  she would invent the art of petting and cosseting and of coining tender little names, if this matrimonial sugar-plummery had not existed ever since the Terrestrial Paradise.  At the end of the month, Adolphe’s condition is like that of children towards the close of New Year’s week.  So Caroline is beginning to say, not in words, but in acts, in manner, in mimetic expressions:  “It’s difficult to tell what to do to please a man!”

Giving up the helm of the boat to one’s wife, is an exceedingly ordinary idea, and would hardly deserve the qualification of “triumphant,” which we have given it at the commencement of this chapter, if it were not accompanied by that of taking it back again.  Adolphe was seduced by a wish, which invariably seizes persons who are the prey of misfortune, to know how far an evil will go!—­to try how much damage fire will do when left to itself, the individual possessing, or thinking he possesses, the power to arrest it.  This curiosity pursues us from the cradle to the grave.  Then, after his plethora of conjugal felicity, Adolphe, who is treating himself to a farce in his own house, goes through the following phases: