“Dear me, madame,” says Madame de Fischtaminel, “it’s better that our husbands should have cosy little times with us than with—­”

“Deschars!—­” suddenly puts in Madame Deschars, as she gets up and says good-bye.

The individual known as Deschars (a man nullified by his wife) does not hear the end of the sentence, by which he might have learned that a man may spend his money with other women.

Caroline, flattered in every one of her vanities, abandons herself to the pleasures of pride and high living, two delicious capital sins.  Adolphe is gaining ground again, but alas! (this reflection is worth a whole sermon in Lent) sin, like all pleasure, contains a spur.  Vice is like an Autocrat, and let a single harsh fold in a rose-leaf irritate it, it forgets a thousand charming bygone flatteries.  With Vice a man’s course must always be crescendo!—­and forever.

Axiom.—­Vice, Courtiers, Misfortune and Love, care only for the PRESENT.

At the end of a period of time difficult to determine, Caroline looks in the glass, at dessert, and notices two or three pimples blooming upon her cheeks, and upon the sides, lately so pure, of her nose.  She is out of humor at the theatre, and you do not know why, you, so proudly striking an attitude in your cravat, you, displaying your figure to the best advantage, as a complacent man should.

A few days after, the dressmaker arrives.  She tries on a gown, she exerts all her strength, but cannot make the hooks and eyes meet.  The waiting maid is called.  After a two horse-power pull, a regular thirteenth labor of Hercules, a hiatus of two inches manifests itself.  The inexorable dressmaker cannot conceal from Caroline the fact that her form is altered.  Caroline, the aerial Caroline, threatens to become like Madame Deschars.  In vulgar language, she is getting stout.  The maid leaves her in a state of consternation.

“What! am I to have, like that fat Madame Deschars, cascades of flesh a la Rubens!  That Adolphe is an awful scoundrel.  Oh, I see, he wants to make me an old mother Gigogne, and destroy my powers of fascination!”

Thenceforward Caroline is willing to go to the opera, she accepts two seats in a box, but she considers it very distingue to eat sparingly, and declines the dainty dinners of her husband.

“My dear,” she says, “a well-bred woman should not go often to these places; you may go once for a joke; but as for making a habitual thing of it—­fie, for shame!”

Borrel and Very, those masters of the art, lose a thousand francs a day by not having a private entrance for carriages.  If a coach could glide under an archway, and go out by another door, after leaving its fair occupants on the threshold of an elegant staircase, how many of them would bring the landlord fine, rich, solid old fellows for customers!

Axiom.—­Vanity is the death of good living.

Caroline very soon gets tired of the theatre, and the devil alone can tell the cause of her disgust.  Pray excuse Adolphe!  A husband is not the devil.