es in an accidental _thou_!

Out in the country I heard a husband call his wife: "Ma berline!" She
was delighted with it, and saw nothing ridiculous in it: she called
her husband, "Mon fiston!" This delicious couple were ignorant of the
existence of such things as petty troubles.

It was in observing this happy pair that the author discovered this
axiom:

Axiom:--In order to be happy in wedlock, you must either be a man of
genius married to an affectionate and intellectual woman, or, by a
chance which is not as common as might be supposed, you must both of
you be exceedingly stupid.

The too celebrated history of the cure of a wounded self-love by
arsenic, proves that, properly speaking, there are no petty troubles
for women in married life.

Axiom.--Woman exists by sentiment where man exists by action.

Now, sentiment can at any moment render a petty trouble either a great
misfortune, or a wasted life, or an eternal misery. Should Caroline
begin, in her ignorance of life and the world, by inflicting upon her
husband the vexations of her stupidity (re-read REVELATIONS), Adolphe,
like any other man, may find a compensation in social excitement: he
goes out, comes back, goes here and there, has business. But for
Caroline, the question everywhere is, To love or not to love, to be or
not to be loved.

Indiscretions are in harmony with the character of the individuals,
with times and places. Two examples will suffice.

Here is the first. A man is by nature dirty and ugly: he is ill-made
and repulsive. There are men, and often rich ones, too, who, by a sort
of unobserved constitution, soil a new suit of clothes in twenty-four
hours. They were born disgusting. It is so disgraceful for a women to
be anything more than just simply a wife to this sort of Adolphe, that
a certain Caroline had long ago insisted upon the suppression of the
modern _thee_ and _thou_ and all other insignia of the wifely dignity.
Society had been for five or six years accustomed to this sort of
thing, and supposed Madame and Monsieur completely separated, and all
the more so as it had noticed the accession of a Ferdinand II.

One evening, in the presence of a dozen persons, this man said to his
wife: "Caroline, hand me the tongs, there's a love." It is nothing,
and yet everything. It was a domestic revelation.

Monsieur de Lustrac, the Universal Amadis, hurried to Madame de
Fischtaminel's, narrated this little scene with all the spi