to
inform them of the marriage of a general who had lately been intimate
in their house.

Caroline at once had a fit of despair, with genuine tears; she
screamed and made the grand dignitary's head ache to such a degree,
that he tried to console her. In the midst of his condolences, the
count forgot himself so far as to say--"What can you expect, my dear,
he really could not marry you!"

And this was one of the highest functionaries of the state, but a
friend of Louis XVIII, and necessarily a little bit Pompadour.

The whole difference, then, between the situation of Adolphe and that
of Caroline, consists in this: though he no longer cares about her,
she retains the right to care about him.

Now, let us listen to "What _they_ say," the theme of the concluding
chapter of this work.

COMMENTARY.

IN WHICH IS EXPLAINED LA FELICITA OF FINALES.

Who has not heard an Italian opera in the course of his life? You must
then have noticed the musical abuse of the word _felicita_, so
lavishly used by the librettist and the chorus at the moment when
everybody is deserting his box or leaving the house.

Frightful image of life. We quit it just when we hear _la felicita_.

Have you reflected upon the profound truth conveyed by this finale, at
the instant when the composer delivers his last note and the author
his last line, when the orchestra gives the last pull at the
fiddle-bow and the last puff at the bassoon, when the principal singers
say "Let's go to supper!" and the chorus people exclaim "How lucky, it
doesn't rain!" Well, in every condition in life, as in an Italian
opera, there comes a time when the joke is over, when the trick is
done, when people must make up their minds to one thing or the other,
when everybody is singing his own _felicita_ for himself. After having
gone through with all the duos, the solos, the stretti, the codas, the
concerted pieces, the duettos, the nocturnes, the phases which these
few scenes, chosen from the ocean of married life, exhibit you, and
which are themes whose variations have doubtless been divined by
persons with brains as well as by the shallow--for so far as suffering
is concerned, we are all equal--the greater part of Parisian
households reach, without a given time, the following final chorus:

THE WIFE, _to a young woman in the conjugal Indian Summer_. My dear, I
am the happiest woman in the world. Adolphe is the model of husban