Do you understand?  You cannot suspect Caroline of the slightest inclination for Monsieur Deschars, a low, fat, red-faced man, formerly a notary, while you are in love with Madame de Fischtaminel!  Then Caroline, the Caroline whose simplicity caused you such agony, Caroline who has become familiar with society, Caroline becomes acute and witty:  you have two gadflies instead of one.

The next day she asks you, with a charming air of interest, “How are you coming on with Madame de Fischtaminel?”

When you go out, she says:  “Go and drink something calming, my dear.”  For, in their anger with a rival, all women, duchesses even, will use invectives, and even venture into the domain of Billingsgate; they make an offensive weapon of anything and everything.

To try to convince Caroline that she is mistaken and that you are indifferent to Madame de Fischtaminel, would cost you dear.  This is a blunder that no sensible man commits; he would lose his power and spike his own guns.

Oh!  Adolphe, you have arrived unfortunately at that season so ingeniously called the Indian Summer of Marriage.

You must now—­pleasing task!—­win your wife, your Caroline, over again, seize her by the waist again, and become the best of husbands by trying to guess at things to please her, so as to act according to her whims instead of according to your will.  This is the whole question henceforth.

HARD LABOR.

Let us admit this, which, in our opinion, is a truism made as good as new: 

Axiom.—­Most men have some of the wit required by a difficult position, when they have not the whole of it.

As for those husbands who are not up to their situation, it is impossible to consider their case here:  without any struggle whatever they simply enter the numerous class of the Resigned.

Adolphe says to himself:  “Women are children:  offer them a lump of sugar, and you will easily get them to dance all the dances that greedy children dance; but you must always have a sugar plum in hand, hold it up pretty high, and—­take care that their fancy for sweetmeats does not leave them.  Parisian women—­and Caroline is one—­are very vain, and as for their voracity—­don’t speak of it.  Now you cannot govern men and make friends of them, unless you work upon them through their vices, and flatter their passions:  my wife is mine!”

Some days afterward, during which Adolphe has been unusually attentive to his wife, he discourses to her as follows: 

“Caroline, dear, suppose we have a bit of fun:  you’ll put on your new gown—­the one like Madame Deschars!—­and we’ll go to see a farce at the Varieties.”

This kind of proposition always puts a wife in the best possible humor.  So away you go!  Adolphe has ordered a dainty little dinner for two, at Borrel’s Rocher de Cancale.

“As we are going to the Varieties, suppose we dine at the tavern,” exclaims Adolphe, on the boulevard, with the air of a man suddenly struck by a generous idea.