“Do you feel sick?”

“I don’t feel well. [Silence.] I only hope that I shall live long enough to see my daughter married, for I know the meaning, now, of the expression so little understood by the young—­the choice of a husband!  Go to your amusements, Adolphe:  a woman who thinks of the future, a woman who suffers, is not at all diverting:  come, go and have a good time.”

“Where do you feel bad?”

“I don’t feel bad, dear:  I never was better.  I don’t feel anything.  No, really, I am better.  There, leave me to myself.”

This time, being the first, Adolphe goes away almost sad.

A week passes, during which Caroline orders all the servants to conceal from her husband her deplorable situation:  she languishes, she rings when she feels she is going off, she uses a great deal of ether.  The domestics finally acquaint their master with madame’s conjugal heroism, and Adolphe remains at home one evening after dinner, and sees his wife passionately kissing her little Marie.

“Poor child!  I regret the future only for your sake!  What is life, I should like to know?”

“Come, my dear,” says Adolphe, “don’t take on so.”

“I’m not taking on.  Death doesn’t frighten me—­I saw a funeral this morning, and I thought how happy the body was!  How comes it that I think of nothing but death?  Is it a disease?  I have an idea that I shall die by my own hand.”

The more Adolphe tries to divert Caroline, the more closely she wraps herself up in the crape of her hopeless melancholy.  This second time, Adolphe stays at home and is wearied to death.  At the third attack of forced tears, he goes out without the slightest compunction.  He finally gets accustomed to these everlasting murmurs, to these dying postures, these crocodile tears.  So he says: 

“If you are sick, Caroline, you’d better have a doctor.”

“Just as you like!  It will end quicker, so.  But bring a famous one, if you bring any.”

At the end of a month, Adolphe, worn out by hearing the funereal air that Caroline plays him on every possible key, brings home a famous doctor.  At Paris, doctors are all men of discernment, and are admirably versed in conjugal nosography.

“Well, madame,” says the great physician, “how happens it that so pretty a woman allows herself to be sick?”

“Ah! sir, like the nose of old father Aubry, I aspire to the tomb—­”

Caroline, out of consideration for Adolphe, makes a feeble effort to smile.

“Tut, tut!  But your eyes are clear:  they don’t seem to need our infernal drugs.”

“Look again, doctor, I am eaten up with fever, a slow, imperceptible fever—­”

And she fastens her most roguish glance upon the illustrious doctor, who says to himself, “What eyes!”

“Now, let me see your tongue.”

Caroline puts out her taper tongue between two rows of teeth as white as those of a dog.