little. Love animates everything in life, and
conjugal love has a peculiar right to descend to the most trivial
details.

Caroline spends two or three days in inquiries before she learns how the
Italians dress mushrooms. She discovers a Corsican abbe who tells her
that at Biffi's, in the rue de Richelieu, she will not only learn how
the Italians dress mushrooms, but that she will be able to obtain some
Milanese mushrooms. Our pious Caroline thanks the Abbe Serpolini, and
resolves to send him a breviary in acknowledgment.

Caroline's cook goes to Biffi's, comes back from Biffi's, and exhibits
to the countess a quantity of mushrooms as big as the coachman's ears.

"Very good," she says, "did he explain to you how to cook them?"

"Oh, for us cooks, them's a mere nothing," replies the cook.

As a general rule, cooks know everything, in the cooking way, except how
a cook may feather his nest.

At evening, during the second course, all Caroline's fibres quiver
with pleasure at observing the servant bringing to the table a certain
suggestive dish. She has positively waited for this dinner as she had
waited for her husband.

But between waiting with certainty and expecting a positive pleasure,
there is, to the souls of the elect--and everybody will include a woman
who adores her husband among the elect--there is, between these two
worlds of expectation, the difference that exists between a fine night
and a fine day.

The dish is presented to the beloved Adolphe, he carelessly plunges
his spoon in and helps himself, without perceiving Caroline's extreme
emotion, to several of those soft, fat, round things, that travelers who
visit Milan do not for a long time recognize; they take them for some
kind of shell-fish.

"Well, Adolphe?"

"Well, dear."

"Don't you recognize them?"

"Recognize what?"

"Your mushrooms _a l'Italienne_?"

"These mushrooms! I thought they were--well, yes, they _are_ mushrooms!"

"Yes, and _a l'Italienne_, too."

"Pooh, they are old preserved mushrooms, _a la milanaise_. I abominate
them!"

"What kind is it you like, then?"

"_Fungi trifolati_."

Let us observe--to the disgrace of an epoch which numbers and labels
everything, which puts the whole creation in bottles, which is at this
moment classifying one hundred and fifty thousand species of insects,
giving them all the termination _us_, so that a _Silbermanus_ is the
same individual in all countries for the learned men who dissec