pure, of her nose. She
is out of humor at the theatre, and you do not know why, you, so
proudly striking an attitude in your cravat, you, displaying your
figure to the best advantage, as a complacent man should.

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!

Axiom.--Vanity is the death of good living.

Caroline very soon gets tired of the theatre, and the devil alone can
tell the cause of her disgust. Pray excuse Adolphe! A husband is not
the devil.

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!