Would you like a final example?  Observe your husband.  Yesterday he went out in a bad temper—­he had breakfasted badly—­and lo! in the evening, at a quarter to seven, he came home from the Chamber joyful and well-pleased, a smile on his lips, and good-humor in his eye.  He kissed you on the forehead with a certain unconstraint, threw a number of pamphlets and papers with an easy gesture on the sidetable, sat down to table, found the soup delicious, and ate joyously.  “What is the matter with my husband?” you asked yourself . . . .  I will explain.  Your husband spoke yesterday for the first time in the building, you know.  He said—­the sitting was a noisy one, the Left were threshing out some infernal questions—­he said, during the height of the uproar, and rapping with his paper-knife on his desk:  “But we can not hear!” And as these words were received on all sides with universal approbation and cries of “Hear, hear!” he gave his thoughts a more parliamentary expression by adding:  “The voice of the honorable gentleman who is speaking does not reach us.”  It was not much certainly, and the amendment may have been carried all the same, but after all it was a step; a triumph, to tell the truth, since your husband has from day to day put off the delivery of his maiden speech.  Behold a happy deputy, a deputy who has just—­put on his first pair of breeches.

What matter whether the reason be a serious or a futile one, if your blood flows faster, if you feel happier, if you are proud of yourself?  To win a great victory or put on a new bonnet, what matters it if this new bonnet gives you the same joy as a laurel crown?

Therefore do not laugh too much at baby if his first pair of breeches intoxicates him, if, when he wears them, he thinks his shadow longer and the trees less high.  He is beginning his career as a man, dear child, nothing more.

How many things have not people been proud of since the beginning of the world?  They were proud of their noses under Francis the First, of their perukes under Louis XIV, and later on of their appetites and stoutness.  A man is proud of his wife, his idleness, his wit, his stupidity, the beard on his chin, the cravat round his neck, the hump on his back.

CHAPTER XXX

COUNTRY CHILDREN

I love the baby that runs about under the trees of the Tuileries; I love the pretty little fair-haired girls with nice white stockings and unmanageable crinolines.  I like to watch the tiny damsels decked out like reliquaries, and already affecting coquettish and lackadaisical ways.  It seems to me that in each of them I can see thousands of charming faults already peeping forth.  But all these miniature men and women, exchanging postage stamps and chattering of dress, have something of the effect of adorable monstrosities on me.

I like them as I like a bunch of grapes in February, or a dish of green peas in December.