Caroline is playing Schubert’s melodies.  Adolphe takes great pleasure in hearing these compositions well-executed:  he gets up and compliments Caroline.  She bursts into tears.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, I’m nervous.”

“I didn’t know you were subject to that.”

“O Adolphe, you won’t see anything!  Look, my rings come off my fingers:  you don’t love me any more—­I’m a burden to you—­”

She weeps, she won’t listen, she weeps afresh at every word Adolphe utters.

“Suppose you take the management of the house back again?”

“Ah!” she exclaims, rising sharply to her feet, like a spring figure in a box, “now that you’ve had enough of your experience!  Thank you!  Do you suppose it’s money that I want?  Singular method, yours, of pouring balm upon a wounded heart.  No, go away.”

“Very well, just as you like, Caroline.”

This “just as you like” is the first expression of indifference towards a wife:  and Caroline sees before her an abyss towards which she had been walking of her own free will.

THE FRENCH CAMPAIGN.

The disasters of 1814 afflict every species of existence.  After brilliant days of conquest, after the period during which obstacles change to triumphs, and the slightest check becomes a piece of good fortune, there comes a time when the happiest ideas turn out blunders, when courage leads to destruction, and when your very fortifications are a stumbling-block.  Conjugal love, which, according to authors, is a peculiar phase of love, has, more than anything else, its French Campaign, its fatal 1814.  The devil especially loves to dangle his tail in the affairs of poor desolate women, and to this Caroline has come.

Caroline is trying to think of some means of bringing her husband back.  She spends many solitary hours at home, and during this time her imagination works.  She goes and comes, she gets up, and often stands pensively at the window, looking at the street and seeing nothing, her face glued to the panes, and feeling as if in a desert, in the midst of her friends, in the bosom of her luxuriously furnished apartments.

Now, in Paris, unless a person occupy a house of his own, enclosed between a court and a garden, all life is double.  At every story, a family sees another family in the opposite house.  Everybody plunges his gaze at will into his neighbor’s domains.  There is a necessity for mutual observation, a common right of search from which none can escape.  At a given time, in the morning, you get up early, the servant opposite is dusting the parlor, she has left the windows open and has put the rugs on the railing; you divine a multitude of things, and vice-versa.  Thus, in a given time, you are acquainted with the habits of the pretty, the old, the young, the coquettish, the virtuous woman opposite, or the caprices of the coxcomb, the inventions of the old bachelor, the color of the furniture, and the cat of the two pair front.