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Honore de Balzac - Analytical Studies

H >> Honore de Balzac >> Analytical Studies






THE ATTENTIONS OF A WIFE.

Among the keenest pleasures of bachelor life, every man reckons the
independence of his getting up. The fancies of the morning compensate
for the glooms of evening. A bachelor turns over and over in his bed:
he is free to gape loud enough to justify apprehensions of murder, and
to scream at a pitch authorizing the suspicion of joys untold. He can
forget his oaths of the day before, let the fire burn upon the hearth
and the candle sink to its socket,--in short, go to sleep again in
spite of pressing work. He can curse the expectant boots which stand
holding their black mouths open at him and pricking up their ears. He
can pretend not to see the steel hooks which glitter in a sunbeam
which has stolen through the curtains, can disregard the sonorous
summons of the obstinate clock, can bury himself in a soft place,
saying: "Yes, I was in a hurry, yesterday, but am so no longer to-day.
Yesterday was a dotard. To-day is a sage: between them stands the
night which brings wisdom, the night which gives light. I ought to go,
I ought to do it, I promised I would--I am weak, I know. But how can I
resist the downy creases of my bed? My feet feel flaccid, I think I
must be sick, I am too happy just here. I long to see the ethereal
horizon of my dreams again, those women without claws, those winged
beings and their obliging ways. In short, I have found the grain of
salt to put upon the tail of that bird that was always flying away:
the coquette's feet are caught in the line. I have her now--"

Your servant, meantime, reads your newspaper, half-opens your letters,
and leaves you to yourself. And you go to sleep again, lulled by the
rumbling of the morning wagons. Those terrible, vexatious, quivering
teams, laden with meat, those trucks with big tin teats bursting with
milk, though they make a clatter most infernal and even crush the
paving stones, seem to you to glide over cotton, and vaguely remind
you of the orchestra of Napoleon Musard. Though your house trembles in
all its timbers and shakes upon its keel, you think yourself a sailor
cradled by a zephyr.

You alone have the right to bring these joys to an end by throwing
away your night-cap as you twist up your napkin after dinner, and by
sitting up in bed. Then you take yourself to task with such reproaches
as these: "Ah, mercy on me, I must get up!" "Early to bed and early to
rise, makes a man healthy--!" "Get up, lazy bones!"

All this time you remain perfectly tranquil. You look round your
chamber, you collect your wits together. Finally, you emerge from the
bed, spontaneously! Courageously! of your own accord! You go to the
fireplace, you consult the most obliging of timepieces, you utter
hopeful sentences thus couched: "Whatshisname is a lazy creature, I
guess I shall find him in. I'll run. I'll catch him if he's gone. He's
sure to wait for me. There is a quarter of an hour's grace in all
appointments, even between debtor and creditor."

You put on your boots with fury, you dress yourself as if you were
afraid of being caught half-dressed, you have the delight of being in
a hurry, you call your buttons into action, you finally go out like a
conqueror, whistling, brandishing your cane, pricking up your ears and
breaking into a canter.

After all, you say to yourself, you are responsible to no one, you are
your own master!

But you, poor married man, you were stupid enough to say to your wife,
"To-morrow, my dear" (sometimes she knows it two days beforehand), "I
have got to get up early." Unfortunate Adolphe, you have especially
proved the importance of this appointment: "It's to--and to--and above
all to--in short to--"

Two hours before dawn, Caroline wakes you up gently and says to you
softly: "Adolphy dear, Adolphy love!"

"What's the matter? Fire?"

"No, go to sleep again, I've made a mistake; but the hour hand was on
it, any way! It's only four, you can sleep two hours more."

Is not telling a man, "You've only got two hours to sleep," the same
thing, on a small scale, as saying to a criminal, "It's five in the
morning, the ceremony will be performed at half-past seven"? Such
sleep is troubled by an idea dressed in grey and furnished with wings,
which comes and flaps, like a bat, upon the windows of your brain.

A woman in a case like this is as exact as a devil coming to claim a
soul he has purchased. When the clock strikes five, your wife's voice,
too well known, alas! resounds in your ear; she accompanies the
stroke, and says with an atrocious calmness, "Adolphe, it's five
o'clock, get up, dear."

"Ye-e-e-s, ah-h-h-h!"

"Adolphe, you'll be late for your business, you said so yourself."

"Ah-h-h-h, ye-e-e-e-s." You turn over in despair.

"Come, come, love. I got everything ready last night; now you must, my
dear; do you want to miss him? There, up, I say; it's broad daylight."

Caroline throws off the blankets and gets up: she wants to show you
that _she_ can rise without making a fuss. She opens the blinds, she
lets in the sun, the morning air, the noise of the street, and then
comes back.

"Why, Adolphe, you _must_ get up! Who ever would have supposed you had
no energy! But it's just like you men! I am only a poor, weak woman,
but when I say a thing, I do it."

You get up grumbling, execrating the sacrament of marriage. There is
not the slightest merit in your heroism; it wasn't you, but your wife,
that got up. Caroline gets you everything you want with provoking
promptitude; she foresees everything, she gives you a muffler in
winter, a blue-striped cambric shirt in summer, she treats you like a
child; you are still asleep, she dresses you and has all the trouble.
She finally thrusts you out of doors. Without her nothing would go
straight! She calls you back to give you a paper, a pocketbook, you
had forgotten. You don't think of anything, she thinks of everything!

You return five hours afterwards to breakfast, between eleven and
noon. The chambermaid is at the door, or on the stairs, or on the
landing, talking with somebody's valet: she runs in on hearing or
seeing you. Your servant is laying the cloth in a most leisurely
style, stopping to look out of the window or to lounge, and coming and
going like a person who knows he has plenty of time. You ask for your
wife, supposing that she is up and dressed.

"Madame is still in bed," says the maid.

You find your wife languid, lazy, tired and asleep. She had been awake
all night to wake you in the morning, so she went to bed again, and is
quite hungry now.

You are the cause of all these disarrangements. If breakfast is not
ready, she says it's because you went out. If she is not dressed, and
if everything is in disorder, it's all your fault. For everything
which goes awry she has this answer: "Well, you would get up so
early!" "He would get up so early!" is the universal reason. She makes
you go to bed early, because you got up early. She can do nothing all
day, because you would get up so unusually early.

Eighteen months afterwards, she still maintains, "Without me, you
would never get up!" To her friends she says, "My husband get up! If
it weren't for me, he never _would_ get up!"

To this a man whose hair is beginning to whiten, replies, "A graceful
compliment to you, madame!" This slightly indelicate comment puts an
end to her boasts.

This petty trouble, repeated several times, teaches you to live alone
in the bosom of your family, not to tell all you know, and to have no
confidant but yourself: and it often seems to you a question whether
the inconveniences of the married state do not exceed its advantages.



SMALL VEXATIONS.

You have made a transition from the frolicsome allegretto of the
bachelor to the heavy andante of the father of a family.

Instead of that fine English steed prancing and snorting between the
polished shafts of a tilbury as light as your own heart, and moving
his glistening croup under the quadruple network of the reins and
ribbons that you so skillfully manage with what grace and elegance the
Champs Elysees can bear witness--you drive a good solid Norman horse
with a steady, family gait.

You have learned what paternal patience is, and you let no opportunity
slip of proving it. Your countenance, therefore, is serious.

By your side is a domestic, evidently for two purposes like the
carriage. The vehicle is four-wheeled and hung upon English springs:
it is corpulent and resembles a Rouen scow: it has glass windows, and
an infinity of economical arrangements. It is a barouche in fine
weather, and a brougham when it rains. It is apparently light, but,
when six persons are in it, it is heavy and tires out your only horse.

On the back seat, spread out like flowers, is your young wife in full
bloom, with her mother, a big marshmallow with a great many leaves.
These two flowers of the female species twitteringly talk of you,
though the noise of the wheels and your attention to the horse, joined
to your fatherly caution, prevent you from hearing what they say.

On the front seat, there is a nice tidy nurse holding a little girl in
her lap: by her side is a boy in a red plaited shirt, who is
continually leaning out of the carriage and climbing upon the
cushions, and who has a thousand times drawn down upon himself those
declarations of every mother, which he knows to be threats and nothing
else: "Be a good boy, Adolphe, or else--" "I declare I'll never bring
you again, so there!"

His mamma is secretly tired to death of this noisy little boy: he has
provoked her twenty times, and twenty times the face of the little
girl asleep has calmed her.

"I am his mother," she says to herself. And so she finally manages to
keep her little Adolphe quiet.

You have put your triumphant idea of taking your family to ride into
execution. You left your home in the morning, all the opposite
neighbors having come to their windows, envying you the privilege
which your means give you of going to the country and coming back
again without undergoing the miseries of a public conveyance. So you
have dragged your unfortunate Norman horse through Paris to Vincennes,
from Vincennes to Saint Maur, from Saint Maur to Charenton, from
Charenton opposite some island or other which struck your wife and
mother-in-law as being prettier than all the landscapes through which
you had driven them.

"Let's go to Maison's!" somebody exclaims.

So you go to Maison's, near Alfort. You come home by the left bank of
the Seine, in the midst of a cloud of very black Olympian dust. The
horse drags your family wearily along. But alas! your pride has fled,
and you look without emotion upon his sunken flanks, and upon two
bones which stick out on each side of his belly. His coat is roughened
by the sweat which has repeatedly come out and dried upon him, and
which, no less than the dust, has made him gummy, sticky and shaggy.
The horse looks like a wrathy porcupine: you are afraid he will be
foundered, and you caress him with the whip-lash in a melancholy way
that he perfectly understands, for he moves his head about like an
omnibus horse, tired of his deplorable existence.

You think a good deal of this horse; your consider him an excellent
one and he cost you twelve hundred francs. When a man has the honor of
being the father of a family, he thinks as much of twelve hundred
francs as you think of this horse. You see at once the frightful
amount of your extra expenses, in case Coco should have to lie by. For
two days you will have to take hackney coaches to go to your business.
You wife will pout if she can't go out: but she will go out, and take
a carriage. The horse will cause the purchase of numerous extras,
which you will find in your coachman's bill,--your only coachman, a
model coachman, whom you watch as you do a model anybody.

To these thoughts you give expression in the gentle movement of the
whip as it falls upon the animal's ribs, up to his knees in the black
dust which lines the road in front of La Verrerie.

At this moment, little Adolphe, who doesn't know what to do in this
rolling box, has sadly twisted himself up into a corner, and his
grandmother anxiously asks him, "What is the matter?"

"I'm hungry," says the child.

"He's hungry," says the mother to her daughter.

"And why shouldn't he be hungry? It is half-past five, we are not at
the barrier, and we started at two!"

"Your husband might have treated us to dinner in the country."

"He'd rather make his horse go a couple of leagues further, and get
back to the house."

"The cook might have had the day to herself. But Adolphe is right,
after all: it's cheaper to dine at home," adds the mother-in-law.

"Adolphe," exclaims your wife, stimulated by the word "cheaper," "we
go so slow that I shall be seasick, and you keep driving right in this
nasty dust. What are you thinking of? My gown and hat will be ruined!"

"Would you rather ruin the horse?" you ask, with the air of a man who
can't be answered.

"Oh, no matter for your horse; just think of your son who is dying of
hunger: he hasn't tasted a thing for seven hours. Whip up your old
horse! One would really think you cared more for your nag than for
your child!"

You dare not give your horse a single crack with the whip, for he
might still have vigor enough left to break into a gallop and run
away.

"No, Adolphe tries to vex me, he's going slower," says the young wife
to her mother. "My dear, go as slow as you like. But I know you'll say
I am extravagant when you see me buying another hat."

Upon this you utter a series of remarks which are lost in the racket
made by the wheels.

"What's the use of replying with reasons that haven't got an ounce of
common-sense?" cries Caroline.

You talk, turning your face to the carriage and then turning back to
the horse, to avoid an accident.

"That's right, run against somebody and tip us over, do, you'll be rid
of us. Adolphe, your son is dying of hunger. See how pale he is!"

"But Caroline," puts in the mother-in-law, "he's doing the best he
can."

Nothing annoys you so much as to have your mother-in-law take your
part. She is a hypocrite and is delighted to see you quarreling with
her daughter. Gently and with infinite precaution she throws oil on
the fire.

When you arrive at the barrier, your wife is mute. She says not a
word, she sits with her arms crossed, and will not look at you. You
have neither soul, heart, nor sentiment. No one but you could have
invented such a party of pleasure. If you are unfortunate enough to
remind Caroline that it was she who insisted on the excursion, that
morning, for her children's sake, and in behalf of her milk--she
nurses the baby--you will be overwhelmed by an avalanche of frigid and
stinging reproaches.

You bear it all so as "not to turn the milk of a nursing mother, for
whose sake you must overlook some little things," so your atrocious
mother-in-law whispers in your ear.

All the furies of Orestes are rankling in your heart.

In reply to the sacramental words pronounced by the officer of the
customs, "Have you anything to declare?" your wife says, "I declare a
great deal of ill-humor and dust."

She laughs, the officer laughs, and you feel a desire to tip your
family into the Seine.

Unluckily for you, you suddenly remember the joyous and perverse young
woman who wore a pink bonnet and who made merry in your tilbury six
years before, as you passed this spot on your way to the chop-house on
the river's bank. What a reminiscence! Was Madame Schontz anxious
about babies, about her bonnet, the lace of which was torn to pieces
in the bushes? No, she had no care for anything whatever, not even for
her dignity, for she shocked the rustic police of Vincennes by the
somewhat daring freedom of her style of dancing.

You return home, you have frantically hurried your Norman horse, and
have neither prevented an indisposition of the animal, nor an
indisposition of your wife.

That evening, Caroline has very little milk. If the baby cries and if
your head is split in consequence, it is all your fault, as you
preferred the health of your horse to that of your son who was dying
of hunger, and of your daughter whose supper has disappeared in a
discussion in which your wife was right, _as she always is_.

"Well, well," she says, "men are not mothers!"

As you leave the chamber, you hear your mother-in-law consoling her
daughter by these terrible words: "Come, be calm, Caroline: that's the
way with them all: they are a selfish lot: your father was just like
that!"



THE ULTIMATUM.

It is eight o'clock; you make your appearance in the bedroom of your
wife. There is a brilliant light. The chambermaid and the cook hover
lightly about. The furniture is covered with dresses and flowers tried
on and laid aside.

The hair-dresser is there, an artist par excellence, a sovereign
authority, at once nobody and everything. You hear the other domestics
going and coming: orders are given and recalled, errands are well or
ill performed. The disorder is at its height. This chamber is a studio
from whence to issue a parlor Venus.

Your wife desires to be the fairest at the ball which you are to
attend. Is it still for your sake, or only for herself, or is it for
somebody else? Serious questions these.

The idea does not even occur to you.

You are squeezed, hampered, harnessed in your ball accoutrement: you
count your steps as you walk, you look around, you observe, you
contemplate talking business on neutral ground with a stock-broker, a
notary or a banker, to whom you would not like to give an advantage
over you by calling at their house.

A singular fact which all have probably observed, but the causes of
which can hardly be determined, is the peculiar repugnance which men
dressed and ready to go to a party have for discussions or to answer
questions. At the moment of starting, there are few husbands who are
not taciturn and profoundly absorbed in reflections which vary with
their characters. Those who reply give curt and peremptory answers.

But women, at this time, are exceedingly aggravating. They consult
you, they ask your advice upon the best way of concealing the stem of
a rose, of giving a graceful fall to a bunch of briar, or a happy turn
to a scarf. As a neat English expression has it, "they fish for
compliments," and sometimes for better than compliments.

A boy just out of school would discern the motive concealed behind the
willows of these pretexts: but your wife is so well known to you, and
you have so often playfully joked upon her moral and physical
perfections, that you are harsh enough to give your opinion briefly
and conscientiously: you thus force Caroline to put that decisive
question, so cruel to women, even those who have been married twenty
years:

"So I don't suit you then?"

Drawn upon the true ground by this inquiry, you bestow upon her such
little compliments as you can spare and which are, as it were, the
small change, the sous, the liards of your purse.

"The best gown you ever wore!" "I never saw you so well dressed."
"Blue, pink, yellow, cherry [take your pick], becomes you charmingly."
"Your head-dress is quite original." "As you go in, every one will
admire you." "You will not only be the prettiest, but the best
dressed." "They'll all be mad not to have your taste." "Beauty is a
natural gift: taste is like intelligence, a thing that we may be proud
of."

"Do you think so? Are you in earnest, Adolphe?"

Your wife is coquetting with you. She chooses this moment to force
from you your pretended opinion of one and another of her friends, and
to insinuate the price of the articles of her dress you so much
admire. Nothing is too dear to please you. She sends the cook out of
the room.

"Let's go," you say.

She sends the chambermaid out after having dismissed the hair-dresser,
and begins to turn round and round before her glass, showing off to
you her most glorious beauties.

"Let's go," you say.

"You are in a hurry," she returns.

And she goes on exhibiting herself with all her little airs, setting
herself off like a fine peach magnificently exhibited in a fruiterer's
window. But since you have dined rather heartily, you kiss her upon
the forehead merely, not feeling able to countersign your opinions.
Caroline becomes serious.

The carriage waits. All the household looks at Caroline as she goes
out: she is the masterpiece to which all have contributed, and
everybody admires the common work.

Your wife departs highly satisfied with herself, but a good deal
displeased with you. She proceeds loftily to the ball, just as a
picture, caressed by the painter and minutely retouched 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 lovers who have
been caressing each other the whole evening with flaming gaze fail to
do it! Yes, you can bring her home in triumph, she has now nobody but
you, you have one more chance, that of taking your wife by storm! But
no, idiot, stupid and indifferent that you are, you ask her, "What is
the matter?"


Axiom.--A husband should always know what is the matter with his wife,
for she always knows what is not.


"I'm cold," she says.

"The ball was splendid."

"Pooh! nobody of distinction! People have the mania, nowadays, to
invite all Paris into a hole. There were women even on the stairs:
their gowns were horribly smashed, and mine is ruined."

"We had a good time."

"Ah, you men, you play and that's the whole of it. Once married, you
care about as much for your wives as a lion does for the fine arts."

"How changed you are; you were so gay, so happy, so charming when we
arrived."

"Oh, you never understand us women. I begged you to go home, and you
left me there, as if a woman ever did anything without a reason. You
are not without intelligence, but now and then you are so queer I
don't know what you are thinking about."

Once upon this footing, the quarrel becomes more bitter. When you give
your wife your hand to lift her from the carriage, you grasp a woman
of wood: she gives you a "thank you" which puts you in the same rank
as her servant. You understood your wife no better before than you do
after the ball: you find it difficult to follow her, for instead of
going up stairs, she flies up. The rupture is complete.

The chambermaid is involved in your disgrace: she is received with
blunt No's and Yes's, as dry as Brussells rusks, which she swallows
with a slanting glance at you. "Monsieur's always doing these things,"
she mutters.

You alone might have changed Madame's temper. She goes to bed; she has
her revenge to take: you did not comprehend her. Now she does not
comprehend you. She deposits herself on her side of the bed in the
most hostile and offensive posture: she is wrapped up in her chemise,
in her sack, in her night-cap, like a bale of clocks packed for the
East Indies. She says neither good-night, nor good-day, nor dear, nor
Adolphe: you don't exist, you are a bag of wheat.

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