seat, there is a nice tidy nurse holding a little girl in
her lap: by her side is a boy in a red plaited shirt, who is
continually leaning out of the carriage and climbing upon the
cushions, and who has a thousand times drawn down upon himself those
declarations of every mother, which he knows to be threats and nothing
else: "Be a good boy, Adolphe, or else--" "I declare I'll never bring
you again, so there!"

His mamma is secretly tired to death of this noisy little boy: he has
provoked her twenty times, and twenty times the face of the little
girl asleep has calmed her.

"I am his mother," she says to herself. And so she finally manages to
keep her little Adolphe quiet.

You have put your triumphant idea of taking your family to ride into
execution. You left your home in the morning, all the opposite
neighbors having come to their windows, envying you the privilege
which your means give you of going to the country and coming back
again without undergoing the miseries of a public conveyance. So you
have dragged your unfortunate Norman horse through Paris to Vincennes,
from Vincennes to Saint Maur, from Saint Maur to Charenton, from
Charenton opposite some island or other which struck your wife and
mother-in-law as being prettier than all the landscapes through which
you had driven them.

"Let's go to Maison's!" somebody exclaims.

So you go to Maison's, near Alfort. You come home by the left bank of
the Seine, in the midst of a cloud of very black Olympian dust. The
horse drags your family wearily along. But alas! your pride has fled,
and you look without emotion upon his sunken flanks, and upon two
bones which stick out on each side of his belly. His coat is roughened
by the sweat which has repeatedly come out and dried upon him, and
which, no less than the dust, has made him gummy, sticky and shaggy.
The horse looks like a wrathy porcupine: you are afraid he will be
foundered, and you caress him with the whip-lash in a melancholy way
that he perfectly understands, for he moves his head about like an
omnibus horse, tired of his deplorable existence.

You think a good deal of this horse; your consider him an excellent
one and he cost you twelve hundred francs. When a man has the honor of
being the father of a family, he thinks as much of twelve hundred
francs as you think of this horse. You see at once the frightful
amount of your extra expenses, in case Coco should have to lie by. For
two days you will have to