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Updated: June 22, 2025
Adolphe is dining with the Deschars: twelve persons are at table, and Caroline is seated next to a nice young man named Ferdinand, Adolphe's cousin. Between the first and second course, conjugal happiness is the subject of conversation. "There is nothing easier than for a woman to be happy," says Caroline in reply to a woman who complains of her husband.
"You are lucky indeed," returns Madame Deschars with evident jealousy. "Still, a wife who discharges all her duties, deserves such luck, it seems to me." When this terrible sentiment falls from the lips of a married woman, it is clear that she does her duty, after the manner of school-boys, for the reward she expects. At school, a prize is the object: in marriage, a shawl or a piece of jewelry.
"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. 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!
It is an opportunity that the Deschars have seized upon, the folly of a man of letters, a charming villa upon which he lavished one hundred thousand francs and which has been sold at auction for eleven thousand. Caroline has a new dress to air, or a hat with a weeping willow plume things which a tilbury will set off to a charm. Little Charles is left with his grandmother.
Adolphe has come to this. In this situation of things, the worthy and excellent Deschars, that model of the citizen husband, invites the couple known as Adolphe and Caroline to help him and his wife inaugurate a delightful country house.
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!"
"Well!" she replies, "it is not yet time for Charles to go to school." You have gained nothing at all. "But, my dear, Monsieur Deschars certainly sent his little Julius to school at six years. Go and examine the schools and you will find lots of little boys of six there." You talk for ten minutes more without the slightest interruption, and then you ejaculate another "Well?"
If you allow yourself the slightest gesture or expression a little livelier than usual, if you speak a little bit loud, you hear the hissing and viper-like remark: "You wouldn't see Monsieur Deschars behaving like this! Why don't you take Monsieur Deschars for a model?" In short, this idiotic Monsieur Deschars is forever looming up in your household on every conceivable occasion.
For he has often drawn up leases of chateaux with parks and out-houses, for three thousand a year. It is agreed by everybody in the parlor of Madame Deschars, that a country house, so far from being a pleasure, is an unmitigated nuisance. "I don't see how they sell a cabbage for one sou at market, which has to be watered every day from its birth to the time you eat it," says Caroline.
Madame Deschars bites her lips and manifests the greatest displeasure; the young women blush and drop their eyes; the little girls open theirs, nudge each other and prick up their ears. Your feet are glued to the carpet, and you have so much salt in your throat that you believe in a repetition of the event which delivered Lot from his wife.
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