It is eight o"clock; you make your appearance in the bedroom of your wife. There is a brilliant light. The chambermaid and the cook hover lightly about. The furniture is covered with dresses and flowers tried on and laid aside.
The hair-dresser is there, an artist par excellence, a sovereign authority, at once n.o.body and everything. You hear the other domestics going and coming: orders are given and recalled, errands are well or ill performed. The disorder is at its height. This chamber is a studio from whence to issue a parlor Venus.
Your wife desires to be the fairest at the ball which you are to attend. Is it still for your sake, or only for herself, or is it for somebody else? Serious questions these.
The idea does not even occur to you.
You are squeezed, hampered, harnessed in your ball accoutrement: you count your steps as you walk, you look around, you observe, you contemplate talking business on neutral ground with a stock-broker, a notary or a banker, to whom you would not like to give an advantage over you by calling at their house.
A singular fact which all have probably observed, but the causes of which can hardly be determined, is the peculiar repugnance which men dressed and ready to go to a party have for discussions or to answer questions. At the moment of starting, there are few husbands who are not taciturn and profoundly absorbed in reflections which vary with their characters. Those who reply give curt and peremptory answers.
But women, at this time, are exceedingly aggravating. They consult you, they ask your advice upon the best way of concealing the stem of a rose, of giving a graceful fall to a bunch of briar, or a happy turn to a scarf. As a neat English expression has it, "they fish for compliments," and sometimes for better than compliments.
A boy just out of school would discern the motive concealed behind the willows of these pretexts: but your wife is so well known to you, and you have so often playfully joked upon her moral and physical perfections, that you are harsh enough to give your opinion briefly and conscientiously: you thus force Caroline to put that decisive question, so cruel to women, even those who have been married twenty years:
"So I don"t suit you then?"
Drawn upon the true ground by this inquiry, you bestow upon her such little compliments as you can spare and which are, as it were, the small change, the sous, the liards of your purse.
"The best gown you ever wore!" "I never saw you so well dressed."
"Blue, pink, yellow, cherry [take your pick], becomes you charmingly."
"Your head-dress is quite original." "As you go in, every one will admire you." "You will not only be the prettiest, but the best dressed." "They"ll all be mad not to have your taste." "Beauty is a natural gift: taste is like intelligence, a thing that we may be proud of."
"Do you think so? Are you in earnest, Adolphe?"
Your wife is coquetting with you. She chooses this moment to force from you your pretended opinion of one and another of her friends, and to insinuate the price of the articles of her dress you so much admire. Nothing is too dear to please you. She sends the cook out of the room.
"Let"s go," you say.
She sends the chambermaid out after having dismissed the hair-dresser, and begins to turn round and round before her gla.s.s, showing off to you her most glorious beauties.
"Let"s go," you say.
"You are in a hurry," she returns.
And she goes on exhibiting herself with all her little airs, setting herself off like a fine peach magnificently exhibited in a fruiterer"s window. But since you have dined rather heartily, you kiss her upon the forehead merely, not feeling able to countersign your opinions.
Caroline becomes serious.
The carriage waits. All the household looks at Caroline as she goes out: she is the masterpiece to which all have contributed, and everybody admires the common work.
Your wife departs highly satisfied with herself, but a good deal displeased with you. She proceeds loftily to the ball, just as a picture, caressed by the painter and minutely retouched in the studio, is sent to the annual exhibition in the vast bazaar of the Louvre.
Your wife, alas! sees fifty women handsomer than herself: they have invented dresses of the most extravagant price, and more or less original: and that which happens at the Louvre to the masterpiece, happens to the object of feminine labor: your wife"s dress seems pale by the side of another very much like it, but the livelier color of which crushes it. Caroline is n.o.body, and is hardly noticed. When there are sixty handsome women in a room, the sentiment of beauty is lost, beauty is no longer appreciated. Your wife becomes a very ordinary affair. The petty stratagem of her smile, made perfect by practice, has no meaning in the midst of countenances of n.o.ble expression, of self-possessed women of lofty presence. She is completely put down, and no one asks her to dance. She tries to force an expression of pretended satisfaction, but, as she is not satisfied, she hears people say, "Madame Adolphe is looking very ill to-night."
Women hypocritically ask her if she is indisposed and "Why don"t you dance?" They have a whole catalogue of malicious remarks veneered with sympathy and electroplated with charity, enough to d.a.m.n a saint, to make a monkey serious, and to give the devil the shudders.
You, who are innocently playing cards or walking backwards and forwards, and so have not seen one of the thousand pin-p.r.i.c.ks with which your wife"s self-love has been tattooed, you come and ask her in a whisper, "What is the matter?"
"Order _my_ carriage!"
This _my_ is the consummation of marriage. For two years she has said "_my husband"s_ carriage," "_the_ carriage," "_our_ carriage," and now she says "_my_ carriage."
You are in the midst of a game, you say, somebody wants his revenge, or you must get your money back.
Here, Adolphe, we allow that you have sufficient strength of mind to say yes, to disappear, and _not_ to order the carriage.
You have a friend, you send him to dance with your wife, for you have commenced a system of concessions which will ruin you. You already dimly perceive the advantage of a friend.
Finally, you order the carriage. You wife gets in with concentrated rage, she hurls herself into a corner, covers her face with her hood, crosses her arms under her pelisse, and says not a word.
O husbands! Learn this fact; you may, at this fatal moment, repair and redeem everything: and never does the impetuosity of lovers who have been caressing each other the whole evening with flaming gaze fail to do it! Yes, you can bring her home in triumph, she has now n.o.body but you, you have one more chance, that of taking your wife by storm! But no, idiot, stupid and indifferent that you are, you ask her, "What is the matter?"
Axiom.--A husband should always know what is the matter with his wife, for she always knows what is not.
"I"m cold," she says.
"The ball was splendid."
"Pooh! n.o.body of distinction! People have the mania, nowadays, to invite all Paris into a hole. There were women even on the stairs: their gowns were horribly smashed, and mine is ruined."
"We had a good time."
"Ah, you men, you play and that"s the whole of it. Once married, you care about as much for your wives as a lion does for the fine arts."
"How changed you are; you were so gay, so happy, so charming when we arrived."
"Oh, you never understand us women. I begged you to go home, and you left me there, as if a woman ever did anything without a reason. You are not without intelligence, but now and then you are so queer I don"t know what you are thinking about."
Once upon this footing, the quarrel becomes more bitter. When you give your wife your hand to lift her from the carriage, you grasp a woman of wood: she gives you a "thank you" which puts you in the same rank as her servant. You understood your wife no better before than you do after the ball: you find it difficult to follow her, for instead of going up stairs, she flies up. The rupture is complete.
The chambermaid is involved in your disgrace: she is received with blunt No"s and Yes"s, as dry as Brussells rusks, which she swallows with a slanting glance at you. "Monsieur"s always doing these things,"
she mutters.
You alone might have changed Madame"s temper. She goes to bed; she has her revenge to take: you did not comprehend her. Now she does not comprehend you. She deposits herself on her side of the bed in the most hostile and offensive posture: she is wrapped up in her chemise, in her sack, in her night-cap, like a bale of clocks packed for the East Indies. She says neither good-night, nor good-day, nor dear, nor Adolphe: you don"t exist, you are a bag of wheat.
Your Caroline, so enticing five hours before in this very chamber where she frisked about like an eel, is now a junk of lead. Were you the Tropical Zone in person, astride of the Equator, you could not melt the ice of this little personified Switzerland that pretends to be asleep, and who could freeze you from head to foot, if she liked.
Ask her one hundred times what is the matter with her, Switzerland replies by an ultimatum, like the Diet or the Conference of London.
Nothing is the matter with her: she is tired: she is going to sleep.
The more you insist, the more she erects bastions of ignorance, the more she isolates herself by chevaux-de-frise. If you get impatient, Caroline begins to dream! You grumble, you are lost.
Axiom.--Inasmuch as women are always willing and able to explain their strong points, they leave us to guess at their weak ones.
Caroline will perhaps also condescend to a.s.sure you that she does not feel well. But she laughs in her night-cap when you have fallen asleep, and hurls imprecations upon your slumbering body.