And he narrates, at length, the conception due to du Tillet the banker, interrupting himself to say:  “Oh, what a pretty, cunning, little foot; no one but you could have such a foot as that—­Du Tillet, therefore, compromised. What an ear, too!  You have been doubtless told that you had a delicious ear—­And du Tillet was right, for judgment had already been given—­I love small ears, but let me have a model of yours, and I will do anything you like—­du Tillet profited by this to throw the whole loss on your idiotic husband:  oh, what a charming silk, you are divinely dressed!”

“Where were we, sir?”

“How can I remember while admiring your Raphaelistic head?”

At the twenty-seventh compliment, Caroline considers the syndic a man of wit:  she makes him a polite speech, and goes away without learning much more of the enterprise which, not long before had swallowed up three hundred thousand francs.

There are many huge variations of this petty trouble.

EXAMPLE.  Adolphe is brave and susceptible:  he is walking on the Champs Elysees, where there is a crowd of people; in this crowd are several ill-mannered young men who indulge in jokes of doubtful propriety:  Caroline puts up with them and pretends not to hear them, in order to keep her husband out of a duel.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE.  A child belonging to the genus Terrible, exclaims in the presence of everybody: 

“Mamma, would you let Justine hit me?”

“Certainly not.”

“Why do you ask, my little man?” inquires Madame Foullepointe.

“Because she just gave father a big slap, and he’s ever so much stronger than me.”

Madame Foullepointe laughs, and Adolphe, who intended to pay court to her, is cruelly joked by her, after having had a first last quarrel with Caroline.

THE LAST QUARREL.

In every household, husbands and wives must one day hear the striking of a fatal hour.  It is a knell, the death and end of jealousy, a great, noble and charming passion, the only true symptom of love, if it is not even its double.  When a woman is no longer jealous of her husband, all is over, she loves him no more.  So, conjugal love expires in the last quarrel that a woman gives herself the trouble to raise.

Axiom.—­When a woman ceases to quarrel with her husband, the Minotaur has seated himself in a corner arm-chair, tapping his boots with his cane.

Every woman must remember her last quarrel, that supreme petty trouble which often explodes about nothing, but more often still on some occasion of a brutal fact or of a decisive proof.  This cruel farewell to faith, to the childishness of love, to virtue even, is in a degree as capricious as life itself.  Like life it varies in every house.

Here, the author ought perhaps to search out all the varieties of quarrels, if he desires to be precise.

Thus, Caroline may have discovered that the judicial robe of the syndic in Chaumontel’s affair, hides a robe of infinitely softer stuff, of an agreeable, silky color:  that Chaumontel’s hair, in short, is fair, and that his eyes are blue.