"Poor child! I regret the future only for your sake! What is life, I should like to know?"

"Come, my dear," says Adolphe, "don't take on so."

"I'm not taking on. Death doesn't frighten me--I saw a funeral this morning, and I thought how happy the body was! How comes it that I think of nothing but death? Is it a disease? I have an idea that I shall die by my own hand."

The more Adolphe tries to divert Caroline, the more closely she wraps herself up in the c.r.a.pe of her hopeless melancholy. This second time, Adolphe stays at home and is wearied to death. At the third attack of forced tears, he goes out without the slightest compunction. He finally gets accustomed to these everlasting murmurs, to these dying postures, these crocodile tears. So he says:

"If you are sick, Caroline, you'd better have a doctor."

"Just as you like! It will end quicker, so. But bring a famous one, if you bring any."

At the end of a month, Adolphe, worn out by hearing the funereal air that Caroline plays him on every possible key, brings home a famous doctor. At Paris, doctors are all men of discernment, and are admirably versed in conjugal nosography.

"Well, madame," says the great physician, "how happens it that so pretty a woman allows herself to be sick?"

"Ah! sir, like the nose of old father Aubry, I aspire to the tomb--"

Caroline, out of consideration for Adolphe, makes a feeble effort to smile.

"Tut, tut! But your eyes are clear: they don't seem to need our infernal drugs."

"Look again, doctor, I am eaten up with fever, a slow, imperceptible fever--"

And she fastens her most roguish glance upon the ill.u.s.trious doctor, who says to himself, "What eyes!"

"Now, let me see your tongue."

Caroline puts out her taper tongue between two rows of teeth as white as those of a dog.

"It is a little bit furred at the root: but you have breakfasted--"

observes the great physician, turning toward Adolphe.

"Oh, a mere nothing," returns Caroline; "two cups of tea--"

Adolphe and the ill.u.s.trious leech look at each other, for the doctor wonders whether it is the husband or the wife that is trifling with him.

"What do you feel?" gravely inquires the physician.

"I don't sleep."

"Good!"

"I have no appet.i.te."

"Well!"

"I have a pain, here."

The doctor examines the part indicated.

"Very good, we'll look at that by and by."

"Now and then a shudder pa.s.ses over me--"

"Very good!"

"I have melancholy fits, I am always thinking of death, I feel promptings of suicide--"

"Dear me! Really!"

"I have rushes of heat to the face: look, there's a constant trembling in my eyelid."

"Capital! We call that a trismus."

The doctor goes into an explanation, which lasts a quarter of an hour, of the trismus, employing the most scientific terms. From this it appears that the trismus is the trismus: but he observes with the greatest modesty that if science knows that the trismus is the trismus, it is entirely ignorant of the cause of this nervous affection, which comes and goes, appears and disappears--"and," he adds, "we have decided that it is altogether nervous."

"Is it very dangerous?" asks Caroline, anxiously.

"Not at all. How do you lie at night?"

"Doubled up in a heap."

"Good. On which side?"

"The left."

"Very well. How many mattresses are there on your bed?"

"Three."

"Good. Is there a spring bed?"

"Yes."

"What is the spring bed stuffed with?"

"Horse hair."

"Capital. Let me see you walk. No, no, naturally, and as if we weren't looking at you."

Caroline walks like f.a.n.n.y Elssler, communicating the most Andalusian little motions to her tournure.

"Do you feel a sensation of heaviness in your knees?"

"Well, no--" she returns to her place. "Ah, no that I think of it, it seems to me that I do."

"Good. Have you been in the house a good deal lately?"

"Oh, yes, sir, a great deal too much--and alone."