If you have paid some attention to the female nature, in its good, great, and grand manifestations, you know that for a loving wife there is no greater pleasure than that of seeing the beloved one absorbing his favorite viands. This springs from the fundamental idea upon which the affection of women is based: that of being the source of all his pleasures, big and 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_.”