Honore de Balzac - Analytical Studies

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"What is the matter?" says Adolphe.

"Will you have a glass of sugar and water?" asks Caroline, busying
herself about your health, and assuming the part of a servant.

"What for?"

"You are not amiable while digesting, you must be in pain. Perhaps you
would like a drop of brandy in your sugar and water? The doctor spoke
of it as an excellent remedy."

"How anxious you are about my stomach!"

"It's a centre, it communicates with the other organs, it will act
upon your heart, and through that perhaps upon your tongue."

Adolphe gets up and walks about without saying a word, but he reflects
upon the acuteness which his wife is acquiring: he sees her daily
gaining in strength and in acrimony: she is getting to display an art
in vexation and a military capacity for disputation which reminds him
of Charles XII and the Russians. Caroline, during this time, is busy
with an alarming piece of mimicry: she looks as if she were going to
faint.

"Are you sick?" asks Adolphe, attacked in his generosity, the place
where women always have us.

"It makes me sick at my stomach, after dinner, to see a man going back
and forth so, like the pendulum of a clock. But it's just like you:
you are always in a fuss about something. You are a queer set: all men
are more or less cracked."

Adolphe sits down by the fire opposite to his wife, and remains there
pensive: marriage appears to him like an immense dreary plain, with
its crop of nettles and mullen stalks.

"What, are you pouting?" asks Caroline, after a quarter of an hour's
observation of her husband's countenance.

"No, I am meditating," replied Adolphe.

"Oh, what an infernal temper you've got!" she returns, with a shrug of
the shoulders. "Is it for what I said about your stomach, your shape
and your digestion? Don't you see that I was only paying you back for
your vermilion? You'll make me think that men are as vain as women.
[Adolphe remains frigid.] It is really quite kind in you to take our
qualities. [Profound silence.] I made a joke and you got angry [she
looks at Adolphe], for you are angry. I am not like you: I cannot bear
the idea of having given you pain! Nevertheless, it's an idea that a
man never would have had, that of attributing your impertinence to
something wrong in your digestion. It's not my Dolph, it's his stomach
that was bold enough to speak. I did not know you were a
ventriloquist, that's all."

Caroline looks at Adolphe and smiles: Adolphe is as stiff as if he
were glued.

"No, he won't laugh! And, in your jargon, you call this having
character. Oh, how much better we are!"

She goes and sits down in Adolphe's lap, and Adolphe cannot help
smiling. This smile, extracted as if by a steam engine, Caroline has
been on the watch for, in order to make a weapon of it.

"Come, old fellow, confess that you are wrong," she says. "Why pout?
Dear me, I like you just as you are: in my eyes you are as slender as
when I married you, and slenderer perhaps."

"Caroline, when people get to deceive themselves in these little
matters, where one makes concessions and the other does not get angry,
do you know what it means?"

"What does it mean?" asks Caroline, alarmed at Adolphe's dramatic
attitude.

"That they love each other less."

"Oh! you monster, I understand you: you were angry so as to make me
believe you loved me!"

Alas! let us confess it, Adolphe tells the truth in the only way he
can--by a laugh.

"Why give me pain?" she says. "If I am wrong in anything, isn't it
better to tell me of it kindly, than brutally to say [here she raises
her voice], 'Your nose is getting red!' No, that is not right! To
please you, I will use an expression of the fair Fischtaminel, 'It's
not the act of a gentleman!'"

Adolphe laughs and pays the expenses of the reconciliation; but
instead of discovering therein what will please Caroline and what will
attach her to him, he finds out what attaches him to her.

NOSOGRAPHY OF THE VILLA.

Is it advantageous for a man not to know what will please his wife
after their marriage? Some women (this still occurs in the country)
are innocent enough to tell promptly what they want and what they
like. But in Paris, nearly every woman feels a kind of enjoyment in
seeing a man wistfully obedient to her heart, her desires, her
caprices--three expressions for the same thing!--and anxiously going
round and round, half crazy and desperate, like a dog that has lost
his master.

They call this _being loved_, poor things! And a good many of them say
to themselves, as did Caroline, "How will he manage?"

Adolphe has come to this. In this situation of things, the worthy and
excellent Deschars, that model of the citizen husband, invites the
couple known as Adolphe and Caroline to help him and his wife
inaugurate a delightful country house. It is an opportunity that the
Deschars have seized upon, the folly of a man of letters, a charming
villa upon which he lavished one hundred thousand francs and which has
been sold at auction for eleven thousand. Caroline has a new dress to
air, or a hat with a weeping willow plume--things which a tilbury will
set off to a charm. Little Charles is left with his grandmother. The
servants have a holiday. The youthful pair start beneath the smile of
a blue sky, flecked with milk-while clouds merely to heighten the
effect. They breathe the pure air, through which trots the heavy
Norman horse, animated by the influence of spring. They soon reach
Marnes, beyond Ville d'Avray, where the Deschars are spreading
themselves in a villa copied from one at Florence, and surrounded by
Swiss meadows, though without all the objectionable features of the
Alps.

"Dear me! what a delightful thing a country house like this must be!"
exclaims Caroline, as she walks in the admirable wood that skirts
Marnes and Ville d'Avray. "It makes your eyes as happy as if they had
a heart in them."

Caroline, having no one to take but Adolphe, takes Adolphe, who
becomes her Adolphe again. And then you should see her run about like
a fawn, and act once more the sweet, pretty, innocent, adorable
school-girl that she was! Her braids come down! She takes off her
bonnet, and holds it by the strings! She is young, pink and white
again. Her eyes smile, her mouth is a pomegranate endowed with
sensibility, with a sensibility which seems quite fresh.

"So a country house would please you very much, would it, darling?"
says Adolphe, clasping Caroline round the waist, and noticing that she
leans upon him as if to show the flexibility of her form.

"What, will you be such a love as to buy me one? But remember, no
extravagance! Seize an opportunity like the Deschars."

"To please you and to find out what is likely to give you pleasure,
such is the constant study of your own Dolph."

They are alone, at liberty to call each other their little names of
endearment, and run over the whole list of their secret caresses.

"Does he really want to please his little girly?" says Caroline,
resting her head on the shoulder of Adolphe, who kisses her forehead,
saying to himself, "Gad! I've got her now!"

Axiom.--When a husband and a wife have got each other, the devil only
knows which has got the other.

The young couple are captivating, whereupon the stout Madame Deschars
gives utterance to a remark somewhat equivocal for her, usually so
stern, prudish and devout.

"Country air has one excellent property: it makes husbands very
amiable."

M. Deschars points out an opportunity for Adolphe to seize. A house is
to be sold at Ville d'Avray, for a song, of course. Now, the country
house is a weakness peculiar to the inhabitant of Paris. This
weakness, or disease, has its course and its cure. Adolphe is a
husband, but not a doctor. He buys the house and takes possession with
Caroline, who has become once more his Caroline, his Carola, his fawn,
his treasure, his girly girl.

The following alarming symptoms now succeed each other with frightful
rapidity: a cup of milk, baptized, costs five sous; when it is
anhydrous, as the chemists say, ten sous. Meat costs more at Sevres
than at Paris, if you carefully examine the qualities. Fruit cannot be
had at any price. A fine pear costs more in the country than in the
(anhydrous!) garden that blooms in Chevet's window.

Before being able to raise fruit for oneself, from a Swiss meadow
measuring two square yards, surrounded by a few green trees which look
as if they were borrowed from the scenic illusions of a theatre, the
most rural authorities, being consulted on the point, declare that you
must spend a great deal of money, and--wait five years! Vegetables
dash out of the husbandman's garden to reappear at the city market.
Madame Deschars, who possesses a gate-keeper that is at the same time
a gardener, confesses that the vegetables raised on her land, beneath
her glass frames, by dint of compost and top-soil, cost her twice as
much as those she used to buy at Paris, of a woman who had rent and
taxes to pay, and whose husband was an elector. Despite the efforts
and pledges of the gate-keeper-gardener, early peas and things at
Paris are a month in advance of those in the country.

From eight in the evening to eleven our couple don't know what to do,
on account of the insipidity of the neighbors, their small ideas, and
the questions of self-love which arise out of the merest trifles.

Monsieur Deschars remarks, with that profound knowledge of figures
which distinguishes the ex-notary, that the cost of going to Paris and
back, added to the interest of the cost of his villa, to the taxes,
wages of the gate-keeper and his wife, are equal to a rent of three
thousand francs a year. He does not see how he, an ex-notary, allowed
himself to be so caught! For he has often drawn up leases of chateaux
with parks and out-houses, for three thousand a year.

It is agreed by everybody in the parlor of Madame Deschars, that a
country house, so far from being a pleasure, is an unmitigated
nuisance.

"I don't see how they sell a cabbage for one sou at market, which has
to be watered every day from its birth to the time you eat it," says
Caroline.

"The way to get along in the country," replies a little retired
grocer, "is to stay there, to live there, to become country-folks, and
then everything changes."

On going home, Caroline says to her poor Adolphe, "What an idea that
was of yours, to buy a country house! The best way to do about the
country is to go there on visits to other people."

Adolphe remembers an English proverb, which says, "Don't have a
newspaper or a country seat of your own: there are plenty of idiots
who will have them for you."

"Bah!" returns Adolph, who was enlightened once for all upon women's
logic by the Matrimonial Gadfly, "you are right: but then you know the
baby is in splendid health, here."

Though Adolphe has become prudent, this reply awakens Caroline's
susceptibilities. A mother is very willing to think exclusively of her
child, but she does not want him to be preferred to herself. She is
silent; the next day, she is tired to death of the country. Adolphe
being absent on business, she waits for him from five o'clock to
seven, and goes alone with little Charles to the coach office. She
talks for three-quarters of an hour 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, who arrogates to himself the right
of censorship, no longer finds the slightest suggestion to make.

When he dresses himself, everything is ready to his hands. Not even in
Armide's garden was more ingenious tenderness displayed than that of
Caroline. For her phoenix husband, she renews the wax upon his razor
strap, she substitutes new suspenders for old ones. None of his
button-holes are ever widowed. His linen is as well cared for as that
of the confessor of the devotee, all whose sins are venial. His
stockings are free from holes. At table, his tastes, his caprices
even, are studied, consulted: he is getting fat! There is ink in his
inkstand, and the sponge is always moist. He never has occasion to
say, like Louis XIV, "I came near having to wait!" In short, he hears
himself continually called _a love of a man_. He is obliged to
reproach Caroline for neglecting herself: she does not pay sufficient
attention to her own needs. Of this gentle reproach Caroline takes
note.

SECOND EPOCH. The scene changes, at table. Everything is exceedingly
dear. Vegetables are beyond one's means. Wood sells as if it came from
Campeche. Fruit? Oh! as to fruit, princes, bankers and great lords
alone can eat it. Dessert is a cause of ruin. Adolphe often hears
Caroline say to Madame Deschars: "How do you manage?" Conferences are
held in your presence upon the proper way to keep cooks under the
thumb.

A cook who entered your service without effects, without clothes, and
without talent, has come to get her wages in a blue merino gown, set
off by an embroidered neckerchief, her ears embellished with a pair of
ear-rings enriched with small pearls, her feet clothed in comfortable
shoes which give you a glimpse of neat cotton stockings. She has two
trunks full of property, and keeps an account at the savings bank.

Upon this Caroline complains of the bad morals of the lower classes:
she complains of the education and the knowledge of figures which
distinguish domestics. From time to time she utters little axioms like
the following: There are some mistakes you _must_ make!--It's only
those who do nothing who do everything well.--She has the anxieties
that belong to power.--Ah! men are fortunate in not having a house to
keep.--Women bear the burden of the innumerable details.

THIRD EPOCH. Caroline, absorbed in the idea that you should eat merely
to live, treats Adolphe to the delights of a cenobitic table.

Adolphe's stockings are either full of holes or else rough with the
lichen of hasty mendings, for the day is not long enough for all that
his wife has to do. He wears suspenders blackened by use. His linen is
old and gapes like a door-keeper, or like the door itself. At a time
when Adolphe is in haste to conclude a matter of business, it takes
him an hour to dress: he has to pick out his garments one by one,
opening many an article before finding one fit to wear. But Caroline
is charmingly dressed. She has pretty bonnets, velvet boots,
mantillas. She has made up her mind, she conducts her administration
in virtue of this principle: Charity well understood begins at home.
When Adolphe complains of the contrast between his poverty-stricken
wardrobe and Caroline's splendor, she says, "Why, you reproached me
with buying nothing for myself!"

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