“If you discover a cure for my woes, let your daughter know of it —­your daughter who loves you as much as she deplores her misfortunes, and who would have been glad to call herself by some other name than that of

        “NINA FISCHTAMINEL.”

Besides the necessity of describing this petty trouble, which could only be described by the pen of a woman,—­and what a woman she was! —­it was necessary to make you acquainted with a character whom you saw only in profile in the first half of this book, the queen of the particular set in which Caroline lived,—­a woman both envied and adroit, who succeeded in conciliating, at an early date, what she owed to the world with the requirements of the heart.  This letter is her absolution.

INDISCRETIONS.

Women are either chaste—­or vain—­or simply proud.  They are therefore all subject to the following petty trouble: 

Certain husbands are so delighted to have, in the form of a wife, a woman to themselves,—­a possession exclusively due to the legal ceremony,—­that they dread the public’s making a mistake, and they hasten to brand their consort, as lumber-dealers brand their logs while floating down stream, or as the Berry stock-raisers brand their sheep.  They bestow names of endearment, right before people, upon their wives:  names taken, after the Roman fashion (columbella), from the animal kingdom, as:  my chick, my duck, my dove, my lamb; or, choosing from the vegetable kingdom, they call them:  my cabbage, my fig (this only in Provence), my plum (this only in Alsatia).  Never:  —­My flower!  Pray note this discretion.

Or else, which is more serious, they call their wives:—­Bobonne, —­mother,—­daughter,—­good woman,—­old lady:  this last when she is very young.

Some venture upon names of doubtful propriety, such as:  Mon bichon, ma niniche, Tronquette!

We once heard one of our politicians, a man extremely remarkable for his ugliness, call his wife, Moumoutte!

“I would rather he would strike me,” said this unfortunate to her neighbor.

“Poor little woman, she is really unhappy,” resumed the neighbor, looking at me when Moumoutte had gone:  “when she is in company with her husband she is upon pins and needles, and keeps out of his way.  One evening, he actually seized her by the neck and said:  ’Come fatty, let’s go home!’”

It has been alleged that the cause of a very famous husband-poisoning with arsenic, was nothing less than a series of constant indiscretions like these that the wife had to bear in society.  This husband used to give the woman he had won at the point of the Code, public little taps on her shoulder, he would startle her by a resounding kiss, he dishonored her by a conspicuous tenderness, seasoned by those impertinent attentions the secret of which belongs to the French savages who dwell in the depths of the provinces, and whose manners are very little known, despite the efforts of the realists in fiction.  It was, it is said, this shocking situation,—­one perfectly appreciated by a discerning jury,—­which won the prisoner a verdict softened by the extenuating circumstances.