speech was the conclusion of dreadful catalinics, internally
fulminated. She had reached the Marseilles poet's several stabs with a
dirk. So she spoke in a tone that was really terrible. At three in the
morning Caroline was in a profound sleep: Adolphe arrived without her
hearing either carriage, or horse, or bell, or opening door!

Adolphe, who would not permit her to be disturbed, went to bed in the
spare room. When Caroline heard of his return in the morning, two tears
issued from her eyes; she rushed to the spare room without the slightest
preparatory toilet; a hideous attendant, posted on the threshold,
informed her that her husband, having traveled two hundred leagues and
been two nights without sleep, requested that he might not be awakened:
he was exceedingly tired.

Caroline--pious woman that she was--opened the door violently without
being able to wake the only husband that heaven had given her, and then
hastened to church to listen to a thanksgiving mass.

As she was visibly snappish for three whole days, Justine remarked, in
reply to an unjust reproach, and with a chambermaid's finesse:

"Why, madame, your husband's got back!"

"He has only got back to Paris," returned the pious Caroline.

USELESS CARE.

Put yourself in the place of a poor woman of doubtful beauty, who owes
her husband to the weight of her dowry, who gives herself infinite
pains, and spends a great deal of money to appear to advantage and
follow the fashions, who does her best to keep house sumptuously and yet
economically--a house, too, not easy to manage--who, from morality and
dire necessity, perhaps, loves no one but her husband, who has no other
study but the happiness of this precious husband, who, to express all in
one word, joins the maternal sentiment _to the sentiment of her duties_.
This underlined circumlocution is the paraphrase of the word love in the
language of prudes.

Have you put yourself in her place? Well, this too-much-loved husband
by chance remarked at his friend Monsieur de Fischtaminel's, that he was
very fond of mushrooms _a l'Italienne_.

If you have paid some attention to the female nature, in its good,
great, and grand manifestations, you know that for a loving wife there
is no greater pleasure than that of seeing the beloved one absorbing his
favorite viands. This springs from the fundamental idea upon which
the affection of women is based: that of being the source of all
his pleasures, big and