so well with love. Love in a cottage, or "Fifteen hundred francs and
my Sophy," is the dream of starvelings to whom black bread suffices in
their present state; but when love really comes, they grow fastidious
and end by craving the luxuries of gastronomy. Love holds toil and
poverty in horror. It would rather die than merely live on from hand
to mouth.

Many women, returning from a ball, impatient for their beds, throw off
their gowns, their faded flowers, their bouquets, the fragrance of
which has now departed. They leave their little shoes beneath a chair,
the white strings trailing; they take out their combs and let their
hair roll down as it will. Little they care if their husbands see the
puffs, the hairpins, the artful props which supported the elegant
edifices of the hair, and the garlands or the jewels that adorned it.
No more mysteries! all is over for the husband; no more painting or
decoration for him. The corset--half the time it is a corset of a
reparative kind--lies where it is thrown, if the maid is too sleepy to
take it away with her. The whalebone bustle, the oiled-silk
protections round the sleeves, the pads, the hair bought from a
coiffeur, all the false woman is there, scattered about in open sight.
_Disjecta membra poetae_, the artificial poesy, so much admired by
those for whom it is conceived and elaborated, the fragments of a
pretty woman, litter every corner of the room. To the love of a
yawning husband, the actual presents herself, also yawning, in a
dishabille without elegance, and a tumbled night-cap, that of last
night and that of to-morrow night also,--"For really, monsieur, if you
want a pretty cap to rumple every night, increase my pin-money."

There's life as it is! A woman makes herself old and unpleasing to her
husband; but dainty and elegant and adorned for others, for the rival