devil especially loves to dangle his
tail in the affairs of poor desolate women, and to this Caroline has
come.

Caroline is trying to think of some means of bringing her husband
back. She spends many solitary hours at home, and during this time her
imagination works. She goes and comes, she gets up, and often stands
pensively at the window, looking at the street and seeing nothing, her
face glued to the panes, and feeling as if in a desert, in the midst
of her friends, in the bosom of her luxuriously furnished apartments.

Now, in Paris, unless a person occupy a house of his own, enclosed
between a court and a garden, all life is double. At every story, a
family sees another family in the opposite house. Everybody plunges
his gaze at will into his neighbor's domains. There is a necessity for
mutual observation, a common right of search from which none can
escape. At a given time, in the morning, you get up early, the servant
opposite is dusting the parlor, she has left the windows open and has
put the rugs on the railing; you divine a multitude of things, and
vice-versa. Thus, in a given time, you are acquainted with the habits
of the pretty, the old, the young, the coquettish, the virtuous woman
opposite, or the caprices of the coxcomb, the inventions of the old
bachelor, the color of the furniture, and the cat of the two pair
front. Everything furnishes a hint, and becomes matter for divination.
At the fourth story, a grisette, taken by surprise, finds herself--too
late, like the chaste Susanne,--the prey of the delighted lorgnette of
an aged clerk, who earns eighteen hundred francs a year, and who
becomes criminal gratis. On the other hand, a handsome young
gentleman, who, for the present, works without wages, and is only
nineteen years old, appears before the sight of a pious old lady, in
the simple apparel of a man engaged in shaving. The watch thus kept up
is never relaxed, while prudence, on the contrary, has its moments of
forgetfulness. Curtains are not always let down in time. A woman, just
before dark, approaches the window to thread her needle, and the
married man opposite may then admire a head that Raphael might have
painted, and one that he considers worthy of himself--a National Guard
truly imposing when under arms. Oh, sacred private life, where art
thou! Paris is a city ever ready to exhibit itself half naked, a city
essentially libertine and devoid of modesty. For a person's life to be
decorous in