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Petty Troubles of Married Life, essay(s) by Honore de Balzac |
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Part 1 - Hard Labor |
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_ Part First Hard Labor
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. Caroline, delighted with this appearance of good fortune, enters a little parlor where she finds the cloth laid and that neat little service set, which Borrel places at the disposal of those who are rich enough to pay for the quarters intended for the great ones of the earth, who make themselves small for an hour. Women eat little at a formal dinner: their concealed harness hampers them, they are laced tightly, and they are in the presence of women whose eyes and whose tongues are equally to be dreaded. They prefer fancy eating to good eating, then: they will suck a lobster's claw, swallow a quail or two, punish a woodcock's wing, beginning with a bit of fresh fish, flavored by one of those sauces which are the glory of French cooking. France is everywhere sovereign in matters of taste: in painting, fashions, and the like. Gravy is the triumph of taste, in cookery. So that grisettes, shopkeepers' wives and duchesses are delighted with a tasty little dinner washed down with the choicest wines, of which, however, they drink but little, the whole concluded by fruit such as can only be had at Paris; and especially delighted when they go to the theatre to digest the little dinner, and listen, in a comfortable box, to the nonsense uttered upon the stage, and to that whispered in their ears to explain it. But then the bill of the restaurant is one hundred francs, the box costs thirty, the carriage, dress, gloves, bouquet, as much more. This gallantry amounts to the sum of one hundred and sixty francs, which is hard upon four thousand francs a month, if you go often to the Comic, the Italian, or the Grand, Opera. Four thousand francs a month is the interest of a capital of two millions. But then the honor of being a husband is fully worth the price! Caroline tells her friends things which she thinks exceedingly flattering, but which cause a sagacious husband to make a wry face. "Adolphe has been delightful for some time past. I don't know what I have done to deserve so much attention, but he overpowers me. He gives value to everything by those delicate ways which have such an effect upon us women. After taking me Monday to the _Rocher de Cancale_ to dine, he declared that Very was as good a cook as Borrel, and he gave me the little party of pleasure that I told you of all over again, presenting me at dessert with a ticket for the opera. They sang 'William Tell,' which, you know, is my craze." "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. No more love, then! "As for me,"--Madame Deschars is piqued--"I am reasonable. Deschars committed such follies once, but I put a stop to it. You see, my dear, we have two children, and I confess that one or two hundred francs are quite a consideration for me, as the mother of a family." "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.
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!
Fully one-third of the women of Paris are bored by the theatre. Many of them are tired to death of music, and go to the opera for the singers merely, or rather to notice the difference between them in point of execution. What supports the theatre is this: the women are a spectacle before and after the play. Vanity alone will pay the exorbitant price of forty francs for three hours of questionable pleasure, in a bad atmosphere and at great expense, without counting the colds caught in going out. But to exhibit themselves, to see and be seen, to be the observed of five hundred observers! What a glorious mouthful! as Rabelais would say. To obtain this precious harvest, garnered by self-love, a woman must be looked at. Now a woman with her husband is very little looked at. Caroline is chagrined to see the audience entirely taken up with women who are _not_ with their husbands, with eccentric women, in short. Now, as the very slight return she gets from her efforts, her dresses, and her attitudes, does not compensate, in her eyes, for her fatigue, her display and her weariness, it is very soon the same with the theatre as it was with the good cheer; high living made her fat, the theatre is making her yellow. Here Adolphe--or any other man in Adolphe's place--resembles a certain Languedocian peasant who suffered agonies from an agacin, or, in French, corn,--but the term in Lanquedoc is so much prettier, don't you think so? This peasant drove his foot at each step two inches into the sharpest stones along the roadside, saying to the agacin, "Devil take you! Make me suffer again, will you?" "Upon my word," says Adolphe, profoundly disappointed, the day when he receives from his wife a refusal, "I should like very much to know what would please you!" Caroline looks loftily down upon her husband, and says, after a pause worthy of an actress, "I am neither a Strasburg goose nor a giraffe!" "'Tis true, I might lay out four thousand francs a month to better effect," returns Adolphe. "What do you mean?" "With the quarter of that sum, presented to estimable burglars, youthful jail-birds and honorable criminals, I might become somebody, a Man in the Blue Cloak on a small scale; and then a young woman is proud of her husband," Adolphe replies. This answer is the grave of love, and Caroline takes it in very bad part. An explanation follows. This must be classed among the thousand pleasantries of the following chapter, the title of which ought to make lovers smile as well as husbands. If there are yellow rays of light, why should there not be whole days of this extremely matrimonial color? _ |
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