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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 G.o.d 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!
So you will not be surprised to learn that Caroline missed every ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s, 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 Ma.r.s.eilles 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 ma.s.s.
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 circ.u.mlocution 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.
Caroline spends two or three days in inquiries before she learns how the Italians dress mushrooms. She discovers a Corsican abbe who tells her that at Biffi"s, in the rue de Richelieu, she will not only learn how the Italians dress mushrooms, but that she will be able to obtain some Milanese mushrooms. Our pious Caroline thanks the Abbe Serpolini, and resolves to send him a breviary in acknowledgment.
Caroline"s cook goes to Biffi"s, comes back from Biffi"s, and exhibits to the countess a quant.i.ty of mushrooms as big as the coachman"s ears.
"Very good," she says, "did he explain to you how to cook them?"
"Oh, for us cooks, them"s a mere nothing," replies the cook.
As a general rule, cooks know everything, in the cooking way, except how a cook may feather his nest.
At evening, during the second course, all Caroline"s fibres quiver with pleasure at observing the servant bringing to the table a certain suggestive dish. She has positively waited for this dinner as she had waited for her husband.
But between waiting with certainty and expecting a positive pleasure, there is, to the souls of the elect--and everybody will include a woman who adores her husband among the elect--there is, between these two worlds of expectation, the difference that exists between a fine night and a fine day.
The dish is presented to the beloved Adolphe, he carelessly plunges his spoon in and helps himself, without perceiving Caroline"s extreme emotion, to several of those soft, fat, round things, that travelers who visit Milan do not for a long time recognize; they take them for some kind of sh.e.l.l-fish.
"Well, Adolphe?"
"Well, dear."
"Don"t you recognize them?"
"Recognize what?"
"Your mushrooms _a l"Italienne_?"
"These mushrooms! I thought they were--well, yes, they _are_ mushrooms!"
"Yes, and _a l"Italienne_, too."
"Pooh, they are old preserved mushrooms, _a la milanaise_. I abominate them!"
"What kind is it you like, then?"
"_Fungi trifolati_."
Let us observe--to the disgrace of an epoch which numbers and labels everything, which puts the whole creation in bottles, which is at this moment cla.s.sifying one hundred and fifty thousand species of insects, giving them all the termination _us_, so that a _Silberma.n.u.s_ is the same individual in all countries for the learned men who dissect a b.u.t.terfly"s legs with pincers--that we still want a nomenclature for the chemistry of the kitchen, to enable all the cooks in the world to produce precisely similar dishes. It would be diplomatically agreed that French should be the language of the kitchen, as Latin has been adopted by the scientific for botany and entomology, unless it were desired to imitate them in that, too, and thus really have kitchen Latin.
"My dear," resumes Adolphe, on seeing the clouded and lengthened face of his chaste Caroline, "in France the dish in question is called Mushrooms _a l"Italienne, a la provencale, a la bordelaise_. The mushrooms are minced, fried in oil with a few ingredients whose names I have forgotten. You add a taste of garlic, I believe--"
Talk about calamities, of petty troubles! This, do you see, is, to a woman"s heart, what the pain of an extracted tooth is to a child of eight. _Ab uno disce omnes_: which means, "There"s one of them: find the rest in your memory." For we have taken this culinary description as a prototype of the vexations which afflict loving but indifferently loved women.
SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE.
A woman full of faith in the man she loves is a romancer"s fancy. This feminine personage no more exists than does a rich dowry. A woman"s confidence glows perhaps for a few moments, at the dawn of love, and disappears in a trice like a shooting star.
With women who are neither Dutch, nor English, nor Belgian, nor from any marshy country, love is a pretext for suffering, an employment for the superabundant powers of their imaginations and their nerves.
Thus the second idea that takes possession of a happy woman, one who is really loved, is the fear of losing her happiness, for we must do her the justice to say that her first idea is to enjoy it. All who possess treasures are in dread of thieves, but they do not, like women, lend wings and feet to their golden stores.
The little blue flower of perfect felicity is not so common, that the heaven-blessed man who possesses it, should be simpleton enough to abandon it.
Axiom.--A woman is never deserted without a reason.
This axiom is written in the heart of hearts of every woman. Hence the rage of a woman deserted.
Let us not infringe upon the petty troubles of love: we live in a calculating epoch when women are seldom abandoned, do what they may: for, of all wives or women, nowadays, the legitimate is the least expensive. Now, every woman who is loved, has gone through the petty annoyance of suspicion. This suspicion, whether just or unjust, engenders a mult.i.tude of domestic troubles, and here is the biggest of all.