remains for the education of the children (a girl of eight and a boy
of nine, whose maintenance must cost at least two thousand francs
besides) and you will find that Madame Rabourdin could barely afford
to give her husband thirty francs a month. That is the position of
half the husbands in Paris, under penalty of being thought monsters.

Thus it was that this woman who believed herself destined to shine in
the world was condemned to use her mind and her faculties in a sordid
struggle, fighting hand to hand with an account-book. Already,
terrible sacrifice of pride! she had dismissed her man-servant, not
long after the death of her father. Most women grow weary of this
daily struggle; they complain but they usually end by giving up to
fate and taking what comes to them; Celestine's ambition, far from
lessening, only increased through difficulties, and led her, when she
found she could not conquer them, to sweep them aside. To her mind
this complicated tangle of the affairs of life was a Gordian knot
impossible to untie and which genius ought to cut. Far from accepting
the pettiness of middle-class existence, she was angry at the delay
which kept the great things of life from her grasp,--blaming fate as
deceptive. Celestine sincerely believed herself a superior woman.
Perhaps she was right; perhaps she would have been great under great
circumstances; perhaps she was not in her right place. Let us remember
there are as many varieties of woman as there are of man, all of which
society fashions to meet its needs. Now in the social order, as in
Nature's order, there are more young shoots than there are trees, more
spawn than full-grown fish, and many great capacities (Athanase
Granson, for instance) which die withered for want of moisture, like
seeds on stony ground. There are, unquestionably, household women,
accomplished women, ornamental women, women who are exclusively wives,
or mothers, or sweethearts, women purely spiritual or purely material;