You must now--pleasing task!--win your wife, your Caroline, over again, seize her by the waist again, and become the best of husbands by trying to guess at things to please her, so as to act according to her whims instead of according to your will. This is the whole question henceforth. HARD LABOR. Let us admit this, which, in our opinion, is a truism made as good as new: Axiom.--Most men have some of the wit required by a difficult position, when they have not the whole of it. As for those husbands who are not up to their situation, it is impossible to consider their case here: without any struggle whatever they simply enter the numerous class of the _Resigned_. Adolphe says to himself: "Women are children: offer them a lump of sugar, and you will easily get them to dance all the dances that greedy children dance; but you must always have a sugar plum in hand, hold it up pretty high, and--take care that their fancy for sweetmeats does not leave them. Parisian women--and Caroline is one--are very vain, and as for their voracity--don't speak of it. Now you cannot govern men and make friends of them, unless you work upon them through their vices, and flatter their passions: my wife is mine!" Some days afterward, during which Adolphe has been unusually attentive to his wife, he discourses to her as follows: "Caroline, dear, suppose we have a bit of fun: you'll put on your new gown--the one like Madame Deschars!--and we'll go to see a farce at the Varieties." This kind of proposition always puts a wife in the best possible humor. So away you go! Adolphe has ordered a dainty little dinner for two, at Borrel's _Rocher de Cancale_. "As we are going to the Varieties, suppose we dine at the tavern," exclaims Adolphe, on the boulevard, with the air of a man suddenly struck by a generous idea. Caroline, delighted with this appearance of good fortune, enters a little parlor where she finds the cloth laid and that neat little service set, which Borrel places at the disposal of those who are rich enough to pay for the quarters intended for the great ones of the earth, who make themselves small for an hour.