What passion lies in an accidental thou!

Out in the country I heard a husband call his wife:  “Ma berline!” She was delighted with it, and saw nothing ridiculous in it:  she called her husband, “Mon fiston!” This delicious couple were ignorant of the existence of such things as petty troubles.

It was in observing this happy pair that the author discovered this axiom: 

Axiom:—­In order to be happy in wedlock, you must either be a man of genius married to an affectionate and intellectual woman, or, by a chance which is not as common as might be supposed, you must both of you be exceedingly stupid.

The too celebrated history of the cure of a wounded self-love by arsenic, proves that, properly speaking, there are no petty troubles for women in married life.

Axiom.—­Woman exists by sentiment where man exists by action.

Now, sentiment can at any moment render a petty trouble either a great misfortune, or a wasted life, or an eternal misery.  Should Caroline begin, in her ignorance of life and the world, by inflicting upon her husband the vexations of her stupidity (re-read REVELATIONS), Adolphe, like any other man, may find a compensation in social excitement:  he goes out, comes back, goes here and there, has business.  But for Caroline, the question everywhere is, To love or not to love, to be or not to be loved.

Indiscretions are in harmony with the character of the individuals, with times and places.  Two examples will suffice.

Here is the first.  A man is by nature dirty and ugly:  he is ill-made and repulsive.  There are men, and often rich ones, too, who, by a sort of unobserved constitution, soil a new suit of clothes in twenty-four hours.  They were born disgusting.  It is so disgraceful for a women to be anything more than just simply a wife to this sort of Adolphe, that a certain Caroline had long ago insisted upon the suppression of the modern thee and thou and all other insignia of the wifely dignity.  Society had been for five or six years accustomed to this sort of thing, and supposed Madame and Monsieur completely separated, and all the more so as it had noticed the accession of a Ferdinand II.

One evening, in the presence of a dozen persons, this man said to his wife:  “Caroline, hand me the tongs, there’s a love.”  It is nothing, and yet everything.  It was a domestic revelation.

Monsieur de Lustrac, the Universal Amadis, hurried to Madame de Fischtaminel’s, narrated this little scene with all the spirit at his command, and Madame de Fischtaminel put on an air something like Celimene’s and said:  “Poor creature, what an extremity she must be in!”

I say nothing of Caroline’s confusion,—­you have already divined it.

Here is the second.  Think of the frightful situation in which a lady of great refinement was lately placed:  she was conversing agreeably at her country seat near Paris, when her husband’s servant came and whispered in her ear, “Monsieur has come, madame.”