The viscount began to laugh at this literary disappointment of mine, and he said to me, with a self-satisfied air: 

“My wife, like all the young people of our happy century, has been accustomed, for three or four consecutive years, to press her fingers on the keys of a piano, a long-suffering instrument.  She has hammered out Beethoven, warbled the airs of Rossini and run through the exercises of Crammer.  I had already taken pains to convince her of the excellence of music; to attain this end, I have applauded her, I have listened without yawning to the most tiresome sonatas in the world, and I have at last consented to give her a box at the Bouffons.  I have thus gained three quiet evenings out of the seven which God has created in the week.  I am the mainstay of the music shops.  At Paris there are drawing-rooms which exactly resemble the musical snuff-boxes of Germany.  They are a sort of continuous orchestra to which I regularly go in search of that surfeit of harmony which my wife calls a concert.  But most part of the time my wife keeps herself buried in her music-books—­”

“But, my dear sir, do you not recognize the danger that lies in cultivating in a woman a taste for singing, and allowing her to yield to all the excitements of a sedentary life?  It is only less dangerous to make her feed on mutton and drink cold water.”

“My wife never eats anything but the white meat of poultry, and I always take care that a ball shall come after a concert and a reception after an Opera!  I have also succeeded in making her lie down between one and two in the day.  Ah! my dear sir, the benefits of this nap are incalculable!  In the first place each necessary pleasure is accorded as a favor, and I am considered to be constantly carrying out my wife’s wishes.  And then I lead her to imagine, without saying a single word, that she is being constantly amused every day from six o’clock in the evening, the time of our dinner and of her toilet, until eleven o’clock in the morning, the time when we get up.”

“Ah! sir, how grateful you ought to be for a life which is so completely filled up!”

“I have scarcely more than three dangerous hours a day to pass; but she has, of course, sonatas to practice and airs to go over, and there are always rides in the Bois de Boulogne, carriages to try, visits to pay, etc.  But this is not all.  The fairest ornament of a woman is the most exquisite cleanliness.  A woman cannot be too particular in this respect, and no pains she takes can be laughed at.  Now her toilet has also suggested to me a method of thus consuming the best hours of the day in bathing.”