“How many great troubles are included in this petty one!  You men are a vulgar set.  There is not a woman who does not carry her delicacy so far as to embroider her past life with the most delightful fibs, while you—­but I have had my revenge.”

“Madame,” I say, “you are giving this young lady too much information.”

“True,” she returns, “I will tell you the sequel some other time.”

“Thus, you see, mademoiselle,” I say, “you imagine you are buying a neckerchief and you find a petty trouble round your neck:  if you get it given to you—­”

“It’s a great trouble,” retorts the woman of distinction.  “Let us stop here.”

The moral of this fable is that you must wear your neckerchief without thinking too much about it.  The ancient prophets called this world, even in their time, a valley of woe.  Now, at that period, the Orientals had, with the permission of the constituted authorities, a swarm of comely slaves, besides their wives!  What shall we call the valley of the Seine between Calvary and Charenton, where the law allows but one lawful wife.

THE UNIVERSAL AMADIS.

You will understand at once that I began to gnaw the head of my cane, to consult the ceiling, to gaze at the fire, to examine Caroline’s foot, and I thus held out till the marriageable young lady was gone.

“You must excuse me,” I said, “if I have remained behind, perhaps in spite of you:  but your vengeance would lose by being recounted by and by, and if it constituted a petty trouble for your husband, I have the greatest interest in hearing it, and you shall know why.”

“Ah,” she returned, “that expression, ‘it’s altogether moral,’ which he gave as an excuse, shocked me to the last degree.  It was a great consolation, truly, to me, to know that I held the place, in his household, of a piece of furniture, a block; that my kingdom lay among the kitchen utensils, the accessories of my toilet, and the physicians’ prescriptions; that our conjugal love had been assimilated to dinner pills, to veal soup and white mustard; that Madame de Fischtaminel possessed my husband’s soul, his admiration, and that she charmed and satisfied his intellect, while I was a kind of purely physical necessity!  What do you think of a woman’s being degraded to the situation of a soup or a plate of boiled beef, and without parsley, at that!  Oh, I composed a catilinic, that evening—­”

“Philippic is better.”

“Well, either.  I’ll say anything you like, for I was perfectly furious, and I don’t remember what I screamed in the desert of my bedroom.  Do you suppose that this opinion that husbands have of their wives, the parts they give them, is not a singular vexation for us?  Our petty troubles are always pregnant with greater ones.  My Adolphe needed a lesson.  You know the Vicomte de Lustrac, a desperate amateur of women and music, an epicure, one of those ex-beaux of the Empire, who live upon their earlier successes, and who cultivate themselves with excessive care, in order to secure a second crop?”