The rumbling of a vehicle having made the furniture rattle, Caroline assumed a mild tone to conceal the violence of her legitimate emotions.

“Oh! ’tis he!  Run, Justine:  tell him I am waiting for him here.”  Caroline trembled so that she dropped into an arm-chair.

The vehicle was a butcher’s wagon.

It was in anxieties like this that the eight o’clock mass slipped by, like an eel in his slime.  Madame’s toilet operations were resumed, for she was engaged in dressing.  The chambermaid’s nose had already been the recipient of a superb muslin chemise, with a simple hem, which Caroline had thrown at her from the dressing-room, though she had given her the same kind for the last three months.

“What are you thinking of, Justine?  I told you to choose from the chemises that are not numbered.”

The unnumbered chemises were only seven or eight, in the most magnificent trousseau.  They are chemises gotten up and embroidered with the greatest care:  a woman must be a queen, a young queen, to have a dozen.  Each one of Caroline’s was trimmed with valenciennes round the bottom, and still more coquettishly garnished about the neck.  This feature of our manners will perhaps serve to suggest a suspicion, in the masculine world, of the domestic drama revealed by this exceptional chemise.

Caroline had put on a pair of Scotch thread stockings, little prunella buskins, and her most deceptive corsets.  She had her hair dressed in the fashion that most became her, and embellished it with a cap of the most elegant form.  It is unnecessary to speak of her morning gown.  A pious lady who lives at Paris and who loves her husband, knows as well as a coquette how to choose those pretty little striped patterns, have them cut with an open waist, and fastened by loops to buttons in a way which compels her to refasten them two or three times in an hour, with little airs more or less charming, as the case may be.

The nine o’clock mass, the ten o’clock mass, every mass, went by in these preparations, which, for women in love, are one of their twelve labors of Hercules.

Pious women rarely go to church in a carriage, and they are right.  Except in the case of a pouring shower, or intolerably bad weather, a person ought not to appear haughty in the place where it is becoming to be humble.  Caroline was afraid to compromise the freshness of her dress and the purity of her thread stockings.  Alas! these pretexts concealed a reason.

“If I am at church when Adolphe comes, I shall lose the pleasure of his first glance:  and he will think I prefer high mass to him.”

She made this sacrifice to her husband in a desire to please him—­a fearfully worldly consideration.  Prefer the creature to the Creator!  A husband to heaven!  Go and hear a sermon and you will learn what such an offence will cost you.

“After all,” says Caroline, quoting her confessor, “society is founded upon marriage, which the Church has included among its sacraments.”