; and everything about her was arranged in
harmony with a luxury that suits so well with love. Love in a cottage,
or "Fifteen hundred francs and my Sophy," is the dream of starvelings to
whom black bread suffices in their present state; but when love
really comes, they grow fastidious and end by craving the luxuries of
gastronomy. Love holds toil and poverty in horror. It would rather die
than merely live on from hand to mouth.

Many women, returning from a ball, impatient for their beds, throw off
their gowns, their faded flowers, their bouquets, the fragrance of which
has now departed. They leave their little shoes beneath a chair, the
white strings trailing; they take out their combs and let their hair
roll down as it will. Little they care if their husbands see the puffs,
the hairpins, the artful props which supported the elegant edifices
of the hair, and the garlands or the jewels that adorned it. No more
mysteries! all is over for the husband; no more painting or decoration
for him. The corset--half the time it is a corset of a reparative
kind--lies where it is thrown, if the maid is too sleepy to take it away
with her. The whalebone bustle, the oiled-silk protections round the
sleeves, the pads, the hair bought from a coiffeur, all the false woman
is there, scattered about in open sight. _Disjecta membra poetae_, the
artificial poesy, so much admired by those for whom it is conceived and
elaborated, the fragments of a pretty woman, litter every corner of the
room. To the love of a yawning husband, the actual presents herself,
also yawning, in a dishabille without elegance, and a tumbled night-cap,
that of last night and that of to-morrow night also,--"For really,
monsieur, if you want a pretty cap to rumple every night, increase my
pin-money."

There's life as it is! A woman makes herself old and unpleasing to her
husband; but dainty and elegant and adorned for others, for the rival of
all husbands,--for that world which calumniates and tears to shreds her
sex.

Inspired by true love, for Love has, like other creations, its instinct
of preservation, Madame Jules did very differently; she found in the
constant blessing of her love the necessary impulse to fulfil all those
minute personal cares which ought never to be relaxed, because they
perpetuate love. Besides, such personal cares and duties proceed from a
personal dignity which becomes all women, and are among the sweetest of
flatteries, for is it not respe