hed in the studio,
is sent to the annual exhibition in the vast bazaar of the Louvre. Your
wife, alas! sees fifty women handsomer than herself: they have invented
dresses of the most extravagant price, and more or less original: and
that which happens at the Louvre to the masterpiece, happens to the
object of feminine labor: your wife's dress seems pale by the side of
another very much like it, but the livelier color of which crushes it.
Caroline is nobody, and is hardly noticed. When there are sixty handsome
women in a room, the sentiment of beauty is lost, beauty is no longer
appreciated. Your wife becomes a very ordinary affair. The petty
stratagem of her smile, made perfect by practice, has no meaning in the
midst of countenances of noble expression, of self-possessed women
of lofty presence. She is completely put down, and no one asks her to
dance. She tries to force an expression of pretended satisfaction,
but, as she is not satisfied, she hears people say, "Madame Adolphe
is looking very ill to-night." Women hypocritically ask her if she is
indisposed and "Why don't you dance?" They have a whole catalogue of
malicious remarks veneered with sympathy and electroplated with charity,
enough to damn a saint, to make a monkey serious, and to give the devil
the shudders.

You, who are innocently playing cards or walking backwards and forwards,
and so have not seen one of the thousand pin-pricks with which your
wife's self-love has been tattooed, you come and ask her in a whisper,
"What is the matter?"

"Order _my_ carriage!"

This _my_ is the consummation of marriage. For two years she has said
"_my husband's_ carriage," "_the_ carriage," "_our_ carriage," and now
she says "_my_ carriage."

You are in the midst of a game, you say, somebody wants his revenge, or
you must get your money back.

Here, Adolphe, we allow that you have sufficient strength of mind to say
yes, to disappear, and _not_ to order the carriage.

You have a friend, you send him to dance with your wife, for you have
commenced a system of concessions which will ruin you. You already dimly
perceive the advantage of a friend.

Finally, you order the carriage. You wife gets in with concentrated
rage, she hurls herself into a corner, covers her face with her hood,
crosses her arms under her pelisse, and says not a word.

O husbands! Learn this fact; you may, at this fatal moment, repair and
redeem everything: and never does the impetuosity of love