And this is the way in which religious instruction may be put aside in favor of a blind though legitimate love.  Madame refused breakfast, and ordered the meal to be kept hot, just as she kept herself ready, at a moment’s notice, to welcome the precious absentee.

Now these little things may easily excite a laugh:  but in the first place they are continually occurring with couples who love each other, or where one of them loves the other:  besides, in a woman so strait-laced, so reserved, so worthy, as this lady, these acknowledgments of affection went beyond the limits imposed upon her feelings by the lofty self-respect which true piety induces.  When Madame de Fischtaminel narrated this little scene in a devotee’s life, dressing it up with choice by-play, acted out as ladies of the world know how to act out their anecdotes, I took the liberty of saying that it was the Canticle of canticles in action.

“If her husband doesn’t come,” said Justine to the cook, “what will become of us?  She has already thrown her chemise in my face.”

At last, Caroline heard the crack of a postilion’s whip, the well-known rumbling of a traveling carriage, the racket made by the hoofs of post-horses, and the jingling of their bells!  Oh, she could doubt no longer, the bells made her burst forth, as thus: 

“The door!  Open the door!  ’Tis he, my husband!  Will you never go to the door!” And the pious woman stamped her foot and broke the bell-rope.

“Why, madame,” said Justine, with the vivacity of a servant doing her duty, “it’s some people going away.”

“Upon my word,” replied Caroline, half ashamed, to herself, “I will never let Adolphe go traveling again without me.”

A Marseilles poet—­it is not known whether it was Mery or Barthelemy —­acknowledged that if his best fried did not arrive punctually at the dinner hour, he waited patiently five minutes:  at the tenth minute, he felt a desire to throw the napkin in his face:  at the twelfth he hoped some great calamity would befall him:  at the fifteenth, he would not be able to restrain himself from stabbing him several times with a dirk.

All women, when expecting somebody, are Marseilles poets, if, indeed, we may compare the vulgar throes of hunger to the sublime Canticle of canticles of a pious wife, who is hoping for the joys of a husband’s first glance after a three months’ absence.  Let all those who love and who have met again after an absence ten thousand times accursed, be good enough to recall their first glance:  it says so many things that the lovers, if in the presence of a third party, are fain to lower their eyes!  This poem, in which every man is as great as Homer, in which he seems a god to the woman who loves him, is, for a pious, thin and pimpled lady, all the more immense, from the fact that she has not, like Madame de Fischtaminel, the resource of having several copies of it.  In her case, her husband is all she’s got!