e, how many of
them would bring the landlord fine, rich, solid old fellows for
customers!

Axiom.--Vanity is the death of good living.

Caroline very soon gets tired of the theatre, and the devil alone can
tell the cause of her disgust. Pray excuse Adolphe! A husband is not
the devil.

Fully one-third of the women of Paris are bored by the theatre. Many
of them are tired to death of music, and go to the opera for the
singers merely, or rather to notice the difference between them in
point of execution. What supports the theatre is this: the women are a
spectacle before and after the play. Vanity alone will pay the
exorbitant price of forty francs for three hours of questionable
pleasure, in a bad atmosphere and at great expense, without counting
the colds caught in going out. But to exhibit themselves, to see and
be seen, to be the observed of five hundred observers! What a glorious
mouthful! as Rabelais would say.

To obtain this precious harvest, garnered by self-love, a woman must
be looked at. Now a woman with her husband is very little looked at.
Caroline is chagrined to see the audience entirely taken up with women
who are _not_ with their husbands, with eccentric women, in short.
Now, as the very slight return she gets from her efforts, her dresses,
and her attitudes, does not compensate, in her eyes, for her fatigue,
her display and her weariness, it is very soon the same with the
theatre as it was with the good cheer; high living made her fat, the
theatre is making her yellow.

Here Adolphe--or any other man in Adolphe's place--resembles a certain
Languedocian peasant who suffered agonies from an agacin, or, in
French, corn,--but the term in Lanquedoc is so much prettier, don't
you think so? This peasant drove his foot at each step two inches into
the sharpest stones along the roadside, saying to the agacin, "Devil
take you! Make me suffer again, will you?"

"Upon my word," says Adolphe, profoundly disappointed, the day when he
receives from his wife a refusal, "I should like very much to know
what would please you!"

Caroline looks loftily down upon her husband, and says, after a pause
worthy of an actress, "I am neither a Strasburg goose nor a giraffe!"

"'Tis true, I might lay out four thousand francs a month to better
effect," returns Adolphe.

"What do you mean?"

"With the quarter of that sum, presented to estimable burglars,
youthful jail-birds and honorable criminals, I might become so