All this time you remain perfectly tranquil.  You look round your chamber, you collect your wits together.  Finally, you emerge from the bed, spontaneously!  Courageously! of your own accord!  You go to the fireplace, you consult the most obliging of timepieces, you utter hopeful sentences thus couched:  “Whatshisname is a lazy creature, I guess I shall find him in.  I’ll run.  I’ll catch him if he’s gone.  He’s sure to wait for me.  There is a quarter of an hour’s grace in all appointments, even between debtor and creditor.”

You put on your boots with fury, you dress yourself as if you were afraid of being caught half-dressed, you have the delight of being in a hurry, you call your buttons into action, you finally go out like a conqueror, whistling, brandishing your cane, pricking up your ears and breaking into a canter.

After all, you say to yourself, you are responsible to no one, you are your own master!

But you, poor married man, you were stupid enough to say to your wife, “To-morrow, my dear” (sometimes she knows it two days beforehand), “I have got to get up early.”  Unfortunate Adolphe, you have especially proved the importance of this appointment:  “It’s to—­and to—­and above all to—­in short to—­”

Two hours before dawn, Caroline wakes you up gently and says to you softly:  “Adolphy dear, Adolphy love!”

“What’s the matter?  Fire?”

“No, go to sleep again, I’ve made a mistake; but the hour hand was on it, any way!  It’s only four, you can sleep two hours more.”

Is not telling a man, “You’ve only got two hours to sleep,” the same thing, on a small scale, as saying to a criminal, “It’s five in the morning, the ceremony will be performed at half-past seven”?  Such sleep is troubled by an idea dressed in grey and furnished with wings, which comes and flaps, like a bat, upon the windows of your brain.

A woman in a case like this is as exact as a devil coming to claim a soul he has purchased.  When the clock strikes five, your wife’s voice, too well known, alas! resounds in your ear; she accompanies the stroke, and says with an atrocious calmness, “Adolphe, it’s five o’clock, get up, dear.”

“Ye-e-e-s, ah-h-h-h!”

“Adolphe, you’ll be late for your business, you said so yourself.”

“Ah-h-h-h, ye-e-e-e-s.”  You turn over in despair.

“Come, come, love.  I got everything ready last night; now you must, my dear; do you want to miss him?  There, up, I say; it’s broad daylight.”

Caroline throws off the blankets and gets up:  she wants to show you that she can rise without making a fuss.  She opens the blinds, she lets in the sun, the morning air, the noise of the street, and then comes back.

“Why, Adolphe, you must get up!  Who ever would have supposed you had no energy!  But it’s just like you men!  I am only a poor, weak woman, but when I say a thing, I do it.”