Part 47 (2/2)

You are so happy at this turn of affairs, that you hum airs and carelessly chew bits of straw and thread, while still in your s.h.i.+rt and drawers. You are like a hare frisking on a flowering dew-perfumed meadow. You leave off your morning gown till the last extremity, when breakfast is on the table. During the day, if you meet a friend and he happens to speak of women, you defend them; you consider women charming, delicious, there is something divine about them.

How often are our opinions dictated to us by the unknown events of our life!

You take your wife to Madame Deschars'. Madame Deschars is a mother and is exceedingly devout. You never see any newspapers at her house: she keeps watch over her daughters by three different husbands, and keeps them all the more closely from the fact that she herself has, it is said, some little things to reproach herself with during the career of her two former lords. At her house, no one dares risk a jest.

Everything there is white and pink and perfumed with sanct.i.ty, as at the houses of widows who are approaching the confines of their third youth. It seems as if every day were Sunday there.

You, a young husband, join the juvenile society of young women and girls, misses and young people, in the chamber of Madame Deschars. The serious people, politicians, whist-players, and tea-drinkers, are in the parlor.

In Madame Deschars' room they are playing a game which consists in hitting upon words with several meanings, to fit the answers that each player is to make to the following questions:

How do you like it?

What do you do with it?

Where do you put it?

Your turn comes to guess the word, you go into the parlor, take part in a discussion, and return at the call of a smiling young lady. They have selected a word that may be applied to the most enigmatical replies. Everybody knows that, in order to puzzle the strongest heads, the best way is to choose a very ordinary word, and to invent phrases that will send the parlor Oedipus a thousand leagues from each of his previous thoughts.

This game is a poor subst.i.tute for lansquenet or dice, but it is not very expensive.

The word MAL has been made the Sphinx of this particular occasion.

Every one has determined to put you off the scent. The word, among other acceptations, has that of _mal_ [evil], a substantive that signifies, in aesthetics, the opposite of good; of _mal_ [pain, disease, complaint], a substantive that enters into a thousand pathological expressions; then _malle_ [a mail-bag], and finally _malle_ [a trunk], that box of various forms, covered with all kinds of skin, made of every sort of leather, with handles, that journeys rapidly, for it serves to carry travelling effects in, as a man of Delille's school would say.

For you, a man of some sharpness, the Sphinx displays his wiles; he spreads his wings and folds them up again; he shows you his lion's paws, his woman's neck, his horse's loins, and his intellectual head; he shakes his sacred fillets, he strikes an att.i.tude and runs away, he comes and goes, and sweeps the place with his terrible equine tail; he shows his s.h.i.+ning claws, and draws them in; he smiles, frisks, and murmurs. He puts on the looks of a joyous child and those of a matron; he is, above all, there to make fun of you.

You ask the group collectively, ”How do you like it?”

”I like it for love's sake,” says one.

”I like it regular,” says another.

”I like it with a long mane.”

”I like it with a spring lock.”

”I like it unmasked.”

”I like it on horseback.”

”I like it as coming from G.o.d,” says Madame Deschars.

”How do you like it?” you say to your wife.

”I like it legitimate.”

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