This petty trouble—­it is very petty—­is reproduced in a thousand ways in married life, when the honey-moon is over, and when the wife has no personal fortune.

In spite of the author’s repugnance to inserting anecdotes in an exclusively aphoristic work, the tissue of which will bear nothing but the most delicate and subtle observations,—­from the nature of the subject at least,—­it seems to him necessary to illustrate this page by an incident narrated by one of our first physicians.  This repetition of the subject involves a rule of conduct very much in use with the doctors of Paris.

A certain husband was in our Adolphe’s situation.  His Caroline, having once made a signal failure, was determined to conquer, for Caroline often does conquer! (See The Physiology of Marriage, Meditation XXVI, Paragraph Nerves.) She had been lying about on the sofas for two months, getting up at noon, taking no part in the amusements of the city.  She would not go to the theatre,—­oh, the disgusting atmosphere!—­the lights, above all, the lights!  Then the bustle, coming out, going in, the music,—­it might be fatal, it’s so terribly exciting!

She would not go on excursions to the country, oh, certainly it was her desire to do so!—­but she would like (desiderata) a carriage of her own, horses of her own—­her husband would not give her an equipage.  And as to going in hacks, in hired conveyances, the bare thought gave her a rising at the stomach!

She would not have any cooking—­the smell of the meats produced a sudden nausea.  She drank innumerable drugs that her maid never saw her take.

In short, she expended large amounts of time and money in attitudes, privations, effects, pearl-white to give her the pallor of a corpse, machinery, and the like, precisely as when the manager of a theatre spreads rumors about a piece gotten up in a style of Oriental magnificence, without regard to expense!

This couple had got so far as to believe that even a journey to the springs, to Ems, to Hombourg, to Carlsbad, would hardly cure the invalid:  but madame would not budge, unless she could go in her own carriage.  Always that carriage!

Adolphe held out, and would not yield.

Caroline, who was a woman of great sagacity, admitted that her husband was right.

“Adolphe is right,” she said to her friends, “it is I who am unreasonable:  he can not, he ought not, have a carriage yet:  men know better than we do the situation of their business.”

At times Adolphe was perfectly furious!  Women have ways about them that demand the justice of Tophet itself.  Finally, during the third month, he met one of his school friends, a lieutenant in the corps of physicians, modest as all young doctors are:  he had had his epaulettes one day only, and could give the order to fire!

“For a young woman, a young doctor,” said our Adolphe to himself.

And he proposed to the future Bianchon to visit his wife and tell him the truth about her condition.