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 curre
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