to the opera for the singers
merely, or rather to notice the difference between them in point of
execution. What supports the theatre is this: the women are a spectacle
before and after the play. Vanity alone will pay the exorbitant price
of forty francs for three hours of questionable pleasure, in a bad
atmosphere and at great expense, without counting the colds caught in
going out. But to exhibit themselves, to see and be seen, to be the
observed of five hundred observers! What a glorious mouthful! as
Rabelais would say.

To obtain this precious harvest, garnered by self-love, a woman must
be looked at. Now a woman with her husband is very little looked at.
Caroline is chagrined to see the audience entirely taken up with women
who are _not_ with their husbands, with eccentric women, in short. Now,
as the very slight return she gets from her efforts, her dresses, and
her attitudes, does not compensate, in her eyes, for her fatigue, her
display and her weariness, it is very soon the same with the theatre
as it was with the good cheer; high living made her fat, the theatre is
making her yellow.

Here Adolphe--or any other man in Adolphe's place--resembles a certain
Languedocian peasant who suffered agonies from an agacin, or, in French,
corn,--but the term in Lanquedoc is so much prettier, don't you think
so? This peasant drove his foot at each step two inches into the
sharpest stones along the roadside, saying to the agacin, "Devil take
you! Make me suffer again, will you?"

"Upon my word," says Adolphe, profoundly disappointed, the day when he
receives from his wife a refusal, "I should like very much to know what
would please you!"

Caroline looks loftily down upon her husband, and says, after a pause
worthy of an actress, "I am neither a Strasburg goose nor a giraffe!"

"'Tis true, I might lay out four thousand francs a month to better
effect," returns Adolphe.

"What do you mean?"

"With the quarter of that sum, presented to estimable burglars, youthful
jail-birds and honorable criminals, I might become somebody, a Man in
the Blue Cloak on a small scale; and then a young woman is proud of her
husband," Adolphe replies.

This answer is the grave of love, and Caroline takes it in very bad
part. An explanation follows. This must be classed among the thousand
pleasantries of the following chapter, the title of which ought to make
lovers smile as well as husbands. If there are yellow rays of light, why
should