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.