s (a man nullified by his wife) does
not hear the end of the sentence, by which he might have learned that
a man may spend his money with other women.

Caroline, flattered in every one of her vanities, abandons herself to
the pleasures of pride and high living, two delicious capital sins.
Adolphe is gaining ground again, but alas! (this reflection is worth a
whole sermon in Lent) sin, like all pleasure, contains a spur. Vice is
like an Autocrat, and let a single harsh fold in a rose-leaf irritate
it, it forgets a thousand charming bygone flatteries. With Vice a
man's course must always be crescendo!--and forever.

Axiom.--Vice, Courtiers, Misfortune and Love, care only for the
PRESENT.

At the end of a period of time difficult to determine, Caroline looks
in the glass, at dessert, and notices two or three pimples blooming
upon her cheeks, and upon the sides, lately so pure, of her nose. She
is out of humor at the theatre, and you do not know why, you, so
proudly striking an attitude in your cravat, you, displaying your
figure to the best advantage, as a complacent man should.

A few days after, the dressmaker arrives. She tries on a gown, she
exerts all her strength, but cannot make the hooks and eyes meet. The
waiting maid is called. After a two horse-power pull, a regular
thirteenth labor of Hercules, a hiatus of two inches manifests itself.
The inexorable dressmaker cannot conceal from Caroline the fact that
her form is altered. Caroline, the aerial Caroline, threatens to
become like Madame Deschars. In vulgar language, she is getting stout.
The maid leaves her in a state of consternation.

"What! am I to have, like that fat Madame Deschars, cascades of flesh
a la Rubens! That Adolphe is an awful scoundrel. Oh, I see, he wants
to make me an old mother Gigogne, and destroy my powers of
fascination!"

Thenceforward Caroline is willing to go to the opera, she accepts two
seats in a box, but she considers it very distingue to eat sparingly,
and declines the dainty dinners of her husband.

"My dear," she says, "a well-bred woman should not go often to these
places; you may go once for a joke; but as for making a habitual thing
of it--fie, for shame!"

Borrel and Very, those masters of the art, lose a thousand francs a
day by not having a private entrance for carriages. If a coach could
glide under an archway, and go out by another door, after leaving its
fair occupants on the threshold of an elegant staircas