A cook who entered your service without effects, without clothes, and without talent, has come to get her wages in a blue merino gown, set off by an embroidered neckerchief, her ears embellished with a pair of ear-rings enriched with small pearls, her feet clothed in comfortable shoes which give you a glimpse of neat cotton stockings.  She has two trunks full of property, and keeps an account at the savings bank.

Upon this Caroline complains of the bad morals of the lower classes:  she complains of the education and the knowledge of figures which distinguish domestics.  From time to time she utters little axioms like the following:  There are some mistakes you must make!—­It’s only those who do nothing who do everything well.—­She has the anxieties that belong to power.—­Ah! men are fortunate in not having a house to keep.—­Women bear the burden of the innumerable details.

THIRD EPOCH.  Caroline, absorbed in the idea that you should eat merely to live, treats Adolphe to the delights of a cenobitic table.

Adolphe’s stockings are either full of holes or else rough with the lichen of hasty mendings, for the day is not long enough for all that his wife has to do.  He wears suspenders blackened by use.  His linen is old and gapes like a door-keeper, or like the door itself.  At a time when Adolphe is in haste to conclude a matter of business, it takes him an hour to dress:  he has to pick out his garments one by one, opening many an article before finding one fit to wear.  But Caroline is charmingly dressed.  She has pretty bonnets, velvet boots, mantillas.  She has made up her mind, she conducts her administration in virtue of this principle:  Charity well understood begins at home.  When Adolphe complains of the contrast between his poverty-stricken wardrobe and Caroline’s splendor, she says, “Why, you reproached me with buying nothing for myself!”

The husband and the wife here begin to bandy jests more or less acrimonious.  One evening Caroline makes herself very agreeable, in order to insinuate an avowal of a rather large deficit, just as the ministry begins to eulogize the tax-payers, and boast of the wealth of the country, when it is preparing to bring forth a bill for an additional appropriation.  There is this further similitude that both are done in the chamber, whether in administration or in housekeeping.  From this springs the profound truth that the constitutional system is infinitely dearer than the monarchical system.  For a nation as for a household, it is the government of the happy balance, of mediocrity, of chicanery.

Adolphe, enlightened by his past annoyances, waits for an opportunity to explode, and Caroline slumbers in a delusive security.

What starts the quarrel?  Do we ever know what electric current precipitates the avalanche or decides a revolution?  It may result from anything or nothing.  But finally, Adolphe, after a period to be determined in each case by the circumstances of the couple, utters this fatal phrase, in the midst of a discussion:  “Ah! when I was a bachelor!”