for a man not to know what will please his wife
after their marriage? Some women (this still occurs in the country) are
innocent enough to tell promptly what they want and what they like. But
in Paris, nearly every woman feels a kind of enjoyment in seeing a
man wistfully obedient to her heart, her desires, her caprices--three
expressions for the same thing!--and anxiously going round and round,
half crazy and desperate, like a dog that has lost his master.

They call this _being loved_, poor things! And a good many of them say
to themselves, as did Caroline, "How will he manage?"

Adolphe has come to this. In this situation of things, the worthy and
excellent Deschars, that model of the citizen husband, invites the
couple known as Adolphe and Caroline to help him and his wife inaugurate
a delightful country house. It is an opportunity that the Deschars have
seized upon, the folly of a man of letters, a charming villa upon which
he lavished one hundred thousand francs and which has been sold at
auction for eleven thousand. Caroline has a new dress to air, or a hat
with a weeping willow plume--things which a tilbury will set off to a
charm. Little Charles is left with his grandmother. The servants have
a holiday. The youthful pair start beneath the smile of a blue sky,
flecked with milk-while clouds merely to heighten the effect. They
breathe the pure air, through which trots the heavy Norman horse,
animated by the influence of spring. They soon reach Marnes, beyond
Ville d'Avray, where the Deschars are spreading themselves in a villa
copied from one at Florence, and surrounded by Swiss meadows, though
without all the objectionable features of the Alps.

"Dear me! what a delightful thing a country house like this must be!"
exclaims Caroline, as she walks in the admirable wood that skirts Marnes
and Ville d'Avray. "It makes your eyes as happy as if they had a heart
in them."

Caroline, having no one to take but Adolphe, takes Adolphe, who becomes
her Adolphe again. And then you should see her run about like a fawn,
and act once more the sweet, pretty, innocent, adorable school-girl that
she was! Her braids come down! She takes off her bonnet, and holds it
by the strings! She is young, pink and white again. Her eyes smile,
her mouth is a pomegranate endowed with sensibility, with a sensibility
which seems quite fresh.

"So a country house would please you very much, would it, darling?" says
Adolphe, clasping Caroline