you'd better have a doctor."

"Just as you like! It will end quicker, so. But bring a famous one, if
you bring any."

At the end of a month, Adolphe, worn out by hearing the funereal air
that Caroline plays him on every possible key, brings home a famous
doctor. At Paris, doctors are all men of discernment, and are
admirably versed in conjugal nosography.

"Well, madame," says the great physician, "how happens it that so
pretty a woman allows herself to be sick?"

"Ah! sir, like the nose of old father Aubry, I aspire to the tomb--"

Caroline, out of consideration for Adolphe, makes a feeble effort to
smile.

"Tut, tut! But your eyes are clear: they don't seem to need our
infernal drugs."

"Look again, doctor, I am eaten up with fever, a slow, imperceptible
fever--"

And she fastens her most roguish glance upon the illustrious doctor,
who says to himself, "What eyes!"

"Now, let me see your tongue."

Caroline puts out her taper tongue between two rows of teeth as white
as those of a dog.

"It is a little bit furred at the root: but you have breakfasted--"
observes the great physician, turning toward Adolphe.

"Oh, a mere nothing," returns Caroline; "two cups of tea--"

Adolphe and the illustrious leech look at each other, for the doctor
wonders whether it is the husband or the wife that is trifling with
him.

"What do you feel?" gravely inquires the physician.

"I don't sleep."

"Good!"

"I have no appetite."

"Well!"

"I have a pain, here."

The doctor examines the part indicated.

"Very good, we'll look at that by and by."

"Now and then a shudder passes over me--"

"Very good!"

"I have melancholy fits, I am always thinking of death, I feel
promptings of suicide--"

"Dear me! Really!"

"I have rushes of heat to the face: look, there's a constant trembling
in my eyelid."

"Capital! We call that a trismus."

The doctor goes into an explanation, which lasts a quarter of an hour,
of the trismus, employing the most scientific terms. From this it
appears that the trismus is the trismus: but he observes with the
greatest modesty that if science knows that the trismus is the
trismus, it is entirely ignorant of the cause of this nervous
affection, which comes and goes, appears and disappears--"and," he
adds, "we have decided that it is altogether nervous."

"Is it very dangerous?" asks Caroline, anxiously.

"Not at all. How do you lie at night?"

"Doubled up in a heap."

"Good. O