“In what sense did you understand the word, my dear?” you say to Caroline.

“Why, male!” [male.]

Madame Deschars bites her lips and manifests the greatest displeasure; the young women blush and drop their eyes; the little girls open theirs, nudge each other and prick up their ears.  Your feet are glued to the carpet, and you have so much salt in your throat that you believe in a repetition of the event which delivered Lot from his wife.

You see an infernal life before you; society is out of the question.

To remain at home with this triumphant stupidity is equivalent to condemnation to the state’s prison.

Axiom.—­Moral tortures exceed physical sufferings by all the difference which exists between the soul and the body.

The attentions of A wife.

Among the keenest pleasures of bachelor life, every man reckons the independence of his getting up.  The fancies of the morning compensate for the glooms of evening.  A bachelor turns over and over in his bed:  he is free to gape loud enough to justify apprehensions of murder, and to scream at a pitch authorizing the suspicion of joys untold.  He can forget his oaths of the day before, let the fire burn upon the hearth and the candle sink to its socket,—­in short, go to sleep again in spite of pressing work.  He can curse the expectant boots which stand holding their black mouths open at him and pricking up their ears.  He can pretend not to see the steel hooks which glitter in a sunbeam which has stolen through the curtains, can disregard the sonorous summons of the obstinate clock, can bury himself in a soft place, saying:  “Yes, I was in a hurry, yesterday, but am so no longer to-day.  Yesterday was a dotard.  To-day is a sage:  between them stands the night which brings wisdom, the night which gives light.  I ought to go, I ought to do it, I promised I would—­I am weak, I know.  But how can I resist the downy creases of my bed?  My feet feel flaccid, I think I must be sick, I am too happy just here.  I long to see the ethereal horizon of my dreams again, those women without claws, those winged beings and their obliging ways.  In short, I have found the grain of salt to put upon the tail of that bird that was always flying away:  the coquette’s feet are caught in the line.  I have her now—­”

Your servant, meantime, reads your newspaper, half-opens your letters, and leaves you to yourself.  And you go to sleep again, lulled by the rumbling of the morning wagons.  Those terrible, vexatious, quivering teams, laden with meat, those trucks with big tin teats bursting with milk, though they make a clatter most infernal and even crush the paving stones, seem to you to glide over cotton, and vaguely remind you of the orchestra of Napoleon Musard.  Though your house trembles in all its timbers and shakes upon its keel, you think yourself a sailor cradled by a zephyr.

You alone have the right to bring these joys to an end by throwing away your night-cap as you twist up your napkin after dinner, and by sitting up in bed.  Then you take yourself to task with such reproaches as these:  “Ah, mercy on me, I must get up!” “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy—!” “Get up, lazy bones!”