“Caroline,” you say to her aloud, “you must take care of yourself; cross your shawl, be prudent, my darling angel.”

Your wife is delighted with you since you seem to take such an interest in her.  While she is preparing to retire, you lie stretched out upon the sofa.  You contemplate the divine apparition which opens to you the ivory portals of your castles in the air.  Delicious ecstasy!  ’Tis the sublime young woman that you see before you!  She is as white as the sail of the treasure-laden galleon as it enters the harbor of Cadiz.  Your wife, happy in your admiration, now understands your former taciturnity.  You still see, with closed eyes, the sublime young woman; she is the burden of your thoughts, and you say aloud: 

FIFTH AND LAST STANZA.  Divine!  Adorable!  Can there be another woman like her?  Rose of Night!  Column of ivory!  Celestial maiden!  Morning and Evening Star!

Everyone says his prayers; you have said four.

The next morning, your wife is delightful, she coughs no more, she has no need of a doctor; if she dies, it will be of good health; you launched four maledictions upon her, in the name of your sublime young woman, and four times she blessed you for it.  Caroline does not know that in the depths of your heart there wriggles a little red fish like a crocodile, concealed beneath conjugal love like the other would be hid in a basin.

A few days before, your wife had spoken of you in rather equivocal terms to Madame de Fischtaminel:  your fair friend comes to visit her, and Caroline compromises you by a long and humid gaze; she praises you and says she never was happier.

You rush out in a rage, you are beside yourself, and are glad to meet a friend, that you may work off your bile.

“Don’t you ever marry, George; it’s better to see your heirs carrying away your furniture while the death-rattle is in your throat, better to go through an agony of two hours without a drop to cool your tongue, better to be assassinated by inquiries about your will by a nurse like the one in Henry Monnier’s terrible picture of a ‘Bachelor’s Last Moments!’ Never marry under any pretext!”

Fortunately you see the sublime young woman no more.  You are saved from the tortures to which a criminal passion was leading you.  You fall back again into the purgatory of your married bliss; but you begin to be attentive to Madame de Fischtaminel, with whom you were dreadfully in love, without being able to get near her, while you were a bachelor.

OBSERVATIONS.

When you have arrived at this point in the latitude or longitude of the matrimonial ocean, there appears a slight chronic, intermittent affection, not unlike the toothache.  Here, I see, you stop me to ask, “How are we to find the longitude in this sea?  When can a husband be sure he has attained this nautical point?  And can the danger be avoided?”

You may arrive at this point, look you, as easily after ten months as ten years of wedlock; it depends upon the speed of the vessel, its style of rigging, upon the trade winds, the force of the currents, and especially upon the composition of the crew.  You have this advantage over the mariner, that he has but one method of calculating his position, while husbands have at least a thousand of reckoning theirs.