I began to gnaw the head of my cane,
to consult the ceiling, to gaze at the fire, to examine Caroline's foot,
and I thus held out till the marriageable young lady was gone.

"You must excuse me," I said, "if I have remained behind, perhaps in
spite of you: but your vengeance would lose by being recounted by and
by, and if it constituted a petty trouble for your husband, I have the
greatest interest in hearing it, and you shall know why."

"Ah," she returned, "that expression, '_it's altogether moral,_' which
he gave as an excuse, shocked me to the last degree. It was a great
consolation, truly, to me, to know that I held the place, in his
household, of a piece of furniture, a block; that my kingdom lay among
the kitchen utensils, the accessories of my toilet, and the physicians'
prescriptions; that our conjugal love had been assimilated to dinner
pills, to veal soup and white mustard; that Madame de Fischtaminel
possessed my husband's soul, his admiration, and that she charmed
and satisfied his intellect, while I was a kind of purely physical
necessity! What do you think of a woman's being degraded to the
situation of a soup or a plate of boiled beef, and without parsley, at
that! Oh, I composed a catilinic, that evening--"

"Philippic is better."

"Well, either. I'll say anything you like, for I was perfectly furious,
and I don't remember what I screamed in the desert of my bedroom. Do you
suppose that this opinion that husbands have of their wives, the parts
they give them, is not a singular vexation for us? Our petty troubles
are always pregnant with greater ones. My Adolphe needed a lesson. You
know the Vicomte de Lustrac, a desperate amateur of women and music,
an epicure, one of those ex-beaux of the Empire, who live upon their
earlier successes, and who cultivate themselves with excessive care, in
order to secure a second crop?"

"Yes," I said, "one of those laced, braced, corseted old fellows of
sixty, who work such wonders by the grace of their forms, and who might
give a lesson to the youngest dandies among us."

"Monsieur de Lustrac is as selfish as a king, but gallant and
pretentious, spite of his jet black wig."

"As to his whiskers, he dyes them."

"He goes to ten parties in an evening: he's a butterfly."

"He gives capital dinners and concerts, and patronizes inexperienced
songstresses."

"He takes bustle for pleasure."

"Yes, but he makes off with incredible celerity whenever a misfortune