Petty Troubles of Married Life by Honoré de Balzac (general ebook reader TXT) 📖

of her anxieties. She was afraid to go from the house to the office. Is it proper for a young woman to be left alone, so? She cannot support such an existence.

The country house now creates a very peculiar phase; one which deserves a chapter to itself.


TROUBLE WITHIN TROUBLE.

Axiom.--There are parentheses in worry.

EXAMPLE--A great deal of evil has been said of the stitch in the side; but it is nothing to the stitch to which we now refer, which the pleasures of the matrimonial second crop are everlastingly reviving, like the hammer of a note in the piano. This constitutes an irritant, which never flourishes except at the period when the young wife's timidity gives place to that fatal equality of rights which is at once devastating France and the conjugal relation. Every season has its peculiar vexation.

Caroline, after a week spent in taking note of her husband's absences, perceives that he passes seven hours a day away from her. At last, Adolphe, who comes home as gay as an actor who has been applauded, observes a slight coating of hoar frost upon Caroline's visage. After making sure that the coldness of her manner has been observed, Caroline puts on a counterfeit air of interest,--the well-known expression of which possesses the gift of making a man inwardly swear,--and says: "You must have had a good deal of business to-day, dear?"

"Oh, lots!"

"Did you take many cabs?"

"I took seven francs' worth."

"Did you find everybody in?"

"Yes, those with whom I had appointments."

"When did you make appointments with them? The ink in your inkstand is dried up; it's like glue; I wanted to write, and spent a whole hour in moistening it, and even then only produced a thick mud fit to mark bundles with for the East Indies."

Here any and every husband looks suspiciously at his better half.

"It is probable that I wrote them at Paris--"

"What business was it, Adolphe?"

"Why, I thought you knew. Shall I run over the list? First, there's Chaumontel's affair--"

"I thought Monsieur Chaumontel was in Switzerland--"

"Yes, but he has representatives, a lawyer--"

"Didn't you do anything else but business?" asks Caroline, interrupting Adolphe.

Here she gives him a direct, piercing look, by which she plunges into her husband's eyes when he least expects it: a sword in a heart.

"What could I have done? Made a little counterfeit money, run into debt, or embroidered a sampler?"

"Oh, dear, I don't know. And I can't even guess. I am too dull, you've told me so a hundred times."

"There you go, and take an expression of endearment in bad part. How like a woman that is!"

"Have you concluded anything?" she asks, pretending to take an interest in business.

"No, nothing."

"How many persons have you seen?"

"Eleven, without counting those who were walking in the streets."

"How you answer me!"

"Yes, and how you question me! As if you'd been following the trade of an examining judge for the last ten years!"

"Come, tell me all you've done to-day, it will amuse me. You ought to try to please me while you are here! I'm dull enough when you leave me alone all day long."

"You want me to amuse you by telling you about business?"

"Formerly, you told me everything--"

This friendly little reproach disguises the certitude that Caroline wishes to enjoy respecting the serious matters which Adolphe wishes to conceal. Adolphe then undertakes to narrate how he has spent the day. Caroline affects a sort of distraction sufficiently well played to induce the belief that she is not listening.

"But you said just now," she exclaims, at the moment when Adolphe is getting into a snarl, "that you had paid seven francs for cabs, and you now talk of a hack! You took it by the hour, I suppose? Did you do your business in a hack?" she asks, railingly.

"Why should hacks be interdicted?" inquires Adolphe, resuming his narrative.

"Haven't you been to Madame de Fischtaminel's?" she asks in the middle of an exceedingly involved explanation, insolently taking the words out of your mouth.

"Why should I have been there?"

"It would have given me pleasure: I wanted to know whether her parlor is done."

"It is."

"Ah! then you _have_ been there?"

"No, her upholsterer told me."

"Do you know her upholsterer?"

"Yes."

"Who is it?"

"Braschon."

"So you met the upholsterer?"

"Yes."

"You said you only went in carriages."

"Yes, my dear, but to get carriages, you have to go and--"

"Pooh! I dare say Braschon was in the carriage, or the parlor was--one or the other is equally probable."

"You won't listen," exclaims Adolphe, who thinks that a long story will lull Caroline's suspicions.

"I've listened too much already. You've been lying for the last hour, worse than a drummer."

"Well, I'll say nothing more."

"I know enough. I know all I wanted to know. You say you've seen lawyers, notaries, bankers: now you haven't seen one of them! Suppose I were to go to-morrow to see Madame de Fischtaminel, do you know what she would say?"

Here, Caroline watches Adolphe closely: but Adolphe affects a delusive calmness, in the middle of which Caroline throws out her line to fish up a clue.

"Why, she would say that she had had the pleasure of seeing you! How wretched we poor creatures are! We never know what you are doing: here we are stuck, chained at home, while you are off at your business! Fine business, truly! If I were in your place, I would invent business a little bit better put together than yours! Ah, you set us a worthy example! They say women are perverse. Who perverted them?"

Here Adolphe tries, by looking fixedly at Caroline, to arrest the torrent of words. Caroline, like a horse who has just been touched up by the lash, starts off anew, and with the animation of one of Rossini's codas:

"Yes, it's a very neat idea, to put your wife out in the country so that you may spend the day as you like at Paris. So this is the cause of your passion for a country house! Snipe that I was, to be caught in the trap! You are right, sir, a villa is very convenient: it serves two objects. But the wife can get along with it as well as the husband. You may take Paris and its hacks! I'll take the woods and their shady groves! Yes, Adolphe, I am really satisfied, so let's say no more about it."

Adolphe listens to sarcasm for an hour by the clock.

"Have you done, dear?" he asks, profiting by an instant in which she tosses her head after a pointed interrogation.

Then Caroline concludes thus: "I've had enough of the villa, and I'll never set foot in it again. But I know what will happen: you'll keep it, probably, and leave me in Paris. Well, at Paris, I can at least amuse myself, while you go with Madame de Fischtaminel to the woods. What is a _Villa Adolphini_ where you get nauseated if you go six times round the lawn? where they've planted chair-legs and broom-sticks on the pretext of producing shade? It's like a furnace: the walls are six inches thick! and my gentleman is absent seven hours a day! That's what a country seat means!"

"Listen to me, Caroline."

"I wouldn't so much mind, if you would only confess what you did to-day. You don't know me yet: come, tell me, I won't scold you. I pardon you beforehand for all that you've done."

Adolphe, who knows the consequences of a confession too well to make one to his wife, replies--"Well, I'll tell you."

"That's a good fellow--I shall love you better."

"I was three hours--"

"I was sure of it--at Madame de Fischtaminel's!"

"No, at our notary's, as he had got me a purchaser; but we could not come to terms: he wanted our villa furnished. When I left there, I went to Braschon's, to see how much we owed him--"

"You made up this romance while I was talking to you! Look me in the face! I'll go to see Braschon to-morrow."

Adolphe cannot restrain a nervous shudder.

"You can't help laughing, you monster!"

"I laugh at your obstinacy."

"I'll go to-morrow to Madame de Fischtaminel's."

"Oh, go wherever you like!"

"What brutality!" says Caroline, rising and going away with her handkerchief at her eyes.

The country house, so ardently longed for by Caroline, has now become a diabolical invention of Adolphe's, a trap into which the fawn has fallen.

Since Adolphe's discovery that it is impossible to reason with Caroline, he lets her say whatever she pleases.

Two months after, he sells the villa which cost him twenty-two thousand francs for seven thousand! But he gains this by the adventure--he finds out that the country is not the thing that Caroline wants.

The question is becoming serious. Nature, with its woods, its forests, its valleys, the Switzerland of the environs of Paris, the artificial rivers, have amused Caroline for barely six months. Adolphe is tempted to abdicate and take Caroline's part himself.


A HOUSEHOLD REVOLUTION.

One morning, Adolphe is seized by the triumphant idea of letting Caroline find out for herself what she wants. He gives up to her the control of the house, saying, "Do as you like." He substitutes the constitutional system for the autocratic system, a responsible ministry for an absolute conjugal monarchy. This proof of confidence--the object of much secret envy--is, to women, a field-marshal's baton. Women are then, so to speak, mistresses at home.

After this, nothing, not even the memory of the honey-moon, can be compared to Adolphe's happiness for several days. A woman, under such circumstances, is all sugar. She is too sweet: she would invent the art of petting and cosseting and of coining tender little names, if this matrimonial sugar-plummery had not existed ever since the Terrestrial Paradise. At the end of the month, Adolphe's condition is like that of children towards the close of New Year's week. So Caroline is beginning to say, not in words, but in acts, in manner, in mimetic expressions: "It's difficult to tell _what_ to do to please a man!"

Giving up the helm of the boat to one's wife, is an exceedingly ordinary idea, and would hardly deserve the qualification of "triumphant," which we have given it at the commencement of this chapter, if it were not accompanied by that of taking it back again. Adolphe was seduced by a wish, which invariably seizes persons who are the prey of misfortune, to know how far an evil will go!--to try how much damage fire will do when left to itself, the individual possessing, or thinking he possesses, the power to arrest it. This curiosity pursues us from the cradle to the grave. Then, after his plethora of conjugal felicity, Adolphe, who is treating himself to a farce in his own house, goes through the following phases:

FIRST EPOCH. Things go on altogether too well. Caroline buys little account books to keep a list of her expenses in, she buys a nice little piece of furniture to store her money in, she feeds Adolphe superbly, she is happy in his approbation, she discovers that very many articles are needed in the house. It is her ambition to be an incomparable housekeeper. Adolphe,