Adolphe’s stockings are either full of holes or else rough with the lichen of hasty mendings, for the day is not long enough for all that his wife has to do.  He wears suspenders blackened by use.  His linen is old and gapes like a door-keeper, or like the door itself.  At a time when Adolphe is in haste to conclude a matter of business, it takes him an hour to dress:  he has to pick out his garments one by one, opening many an article before finding one fit to wear.  But Caroline is charmingly dressed.  She has pretty bonnets, velvet boots, mantillas.  She has made up her mind, she conducts her administration in virtue of this principle:  Charity well understood begins at home.  When Adolphe complains of the contrast between his poverty-stricken wardrobe and Caroline’s splendor, she says, “Why, you reproached me with buying nothing for myself!”

The husband and the wife here begin to bandy jests more or less acrimonious.  One evening Caroline makes herself very agreeable, in order to insinuate an avowal of a rather large deficit, just as the ministry begins to eulogize the tax-payers, and boast of the wealth of the country, when it is preparing to bring forth a bill for an additional appropriation.  There is this further similitude that both are done in the chamber, whether in administration or in housekeeping.  From this springs the profound truth that the constitutional system is infinitely dearer than the monarchical system.  For a nation as for a household, it is the government of the happy balance, of mediocrity, of chicanery.

Adolphe, enlightened by his past annoyances, waits for an opportunity to explode, and Caroline slumbers in a delusive security.

What starts the quarrel?  Do we ever know what electric current precipitates the avalanche or decides a revolution?  It may result from anything or nothing.  But finally, Adolphe, after a period to be determined in each case by the circumstances of the couple, utters this fatal phrase, in the midst of a discussion:  “Ah! when I was a bachelor!”

Her husband’s bachelor life is to a woman what the phrase, “My dear deceased,” is to a widow’s second husband.  These two stings produce wounds which are never completely healed.

Then Adolphe goes on like General Bonaparte haranguing the Five Hundred:  “We are on a volcano!—­The house no longer has a head, the time to come to an understanding has arrived.—­You talk of happiness, Caroline, but you have compromised, imperiled it by your exactions, you have violated the civil code:  you have mixed yourself up in the discussions of business, and you have invaded the conjugal authority.  —­We must reform our internal affairs.”

Caroline does not shout, like the Five Hundred, “Down with the dictator!” For people never shout a man down, when they feel that they can put him down.

“When I was a bachelor I had none but new stockings!  I had a clean napkin every day on my plate.  The restaurateur only fleeced me of a determinate sum.  I have given up to you my beloved liberty!  What have you done with it?”