So you will not be surprised to learn that Caroline missed every mass and had no breakfast.  This hunger and thirst for Adolphe gave her a violent cramp in the stomach.  She did not think of religion once during the hours of mass, nor during those of vespers.  She was not comfortable when she sat, and she was very uncomfortable when she stood:  Justine advised her to go to bed.  Caroline, quite overcome, retired at about half past five in the evening, after having taken a light soup:  but she ordered a dainty supper at ten.

“I shall doubtless sup with my husband,” she said.

This speech was the conclusion of dreadful catalinics, internally fulminated.  She had reached the Marseilles poet’s several stabs with a dirk.  So she spoke in a tone that was really terrible.  At three in the morning Caroline was in a profound sleep:  Adolphe arrived without her hearing either carriage, or horse, or bell, or opening door!

Adolphe, who would not permit her to be disturbed, went to bed in the spare room.  When Caroline heard of his return in the morning, two tears issued from her eyes; she rushed to the spare room without the slightest preparatory toilet; a hideous attendant, posted on the threshold, informed her that her husband, having traveled two hundred leagues and been two nights without sleep, requested that he might not be awakened:  he was exceedingly tired.

Caroline—­pious woman that she was—­opened the door violently without being able to wake the only husband that heaven had given her, and then hastened to church to listen to a thanksgiving mass.

As she was visibly snappish for three whole days, Justine remarked, in reply to an unjust reproach, and with a chambermaid’s finesse: 

“Why, madame, your husband’s got back!”

“He has only got back to Paris,” returned the pious Caroline.

USELESS CARE.

Put yourself in the place of a poor woman of doubtful beauty, who owes her husband to the weight of her dowry, who gives herself infinite pains, and spends a great deal of money to appear to advantage and follow the fashions, who does her best to keep house sumptuously and yet economically—­a house, too, not easy to manage—­who, from morality and dire necessity, perhaps, loves no one but her husband, who has no other study but the happiness of this precious husband, who, to express all in one word, joins the maternal sentiment to the sentiment of her duties.  This underlined circumlocution is the paraphrase of the word love in the language of prudes.

Have you put yourself in her place?  Well, this too-much-loved husband by chance remarked at his friend Monsieur de Fischtaminel’s, that he was very fond of mushrooms a l’Italienne.

If you have paid some attention to the female nature, in its good, great, and grand manifestations, you know that for a loving wife there is no greater pleasure than that of seeing the beloved one absorbing his favorite viands.  This springs from the fundamental idea upon which the affection of women is based:  that of being the source of all his pleasures, big and little.  Love animates everything in life, and conjugal love has a peculiar right to descend to the most trivial details.