Caroline is trying to think of some means of bringing her husband back.  She spends many solitary hours at home, and during this time her imagination works.  She goes and comes, she gets up, and often stands pensively at the window, looking at the street and seeing nothing, her face glued to the panes, and feeling as if in a desert, in the midst of her friends, in the bosom of her luxuriously furnished apartments.

Now, in Paris, unless a person occupy a house of his own, enclosed between a court and a garden, all life is double.  At every story, a family sees another family in the opposite house.  Everybody plunges his gaze at will into his neighbor’s domains.  There is a necessity for mutual observation, a common right of search from which none can escape.  At a given time, in the morning, you get up early, the servant opposite is dusting the parlor, she has left the windows open and has put the rugs on the railing; you divine a multitude of things, and vice-versa.  Thus, in a given time, you are acquainted with the habits of the pretty, the old, the young, the coquettish, the virtuous woman opposite, or the caprices of the coxcomb, the inventions of the old bachelor, the color of the furniture, and the cat of the two pair front.  Everything furnishes a hint, and becomes matter for divination.  At the fourth story, a grisette, taken by surprise, finds herself—­too late, like the chaste Susanne,—­the prey of the delighted lorgnette of an aged clerk, who earns eighteen hundred francs a year, and who becomes criminal gratis.  On the other hand, a handsome young gentleman, who, for the present, works without wages, and is only nineteen years old, appears before the sight of a pious old lady, in the simple apparel of a man engaged in shaving.  The watch thus kept up is never relaxed, while prudence, on the contrary, has its moments of forgetfulness.  Curtains are not always let down in time.  A woman, just before dark, approaches the window to thread her needle, and the married man opposite may then admire a head that Raphael might have painted, and one that he considers worthy of himself—­a National Guard truly imposing when under arms.  Oh, sacred private life, where art thou!  Paris is a city ever ready to exhibit itself half naked, a city essentially libertine and devoid of modesty.  For a person’s life to be decorous in it, the said person should have a hundred thousand a year.  Virtues are dearer than vices in Paris.

Caroline, whose gaze sometimes steals between the protecting muslins which hide her domestic life from the five stories opposite, at last discovers a young couple plunged in the delights of the honey-moon, and newly established in the first story directly in view of her window.  She spends her time in the most exciting observations.  The blinds are closed early, and opened late.  One day, Caroline, who has arisen at eight o’clock notices, by accident, of course, the maid preparing a bath or a morning dress, a delicious deshabille.  Caroline sighs.