"He receives the key of the case, opens it; a little devil in a white dress jumps at his nose, eager to dance and get out."
"Very well, the husband serves as guide. Has he other cares?"
"An apartment, third floor, costs two thousand francs, the dress of the wife fifteen hundred, the { 451}education of a child, a thousand; the husband earns six thousand."
"I understand; while dancing, they think of all sorts of melancholy things."
"Of economizing, keeping up appearances, flattering, calculating."
"An act of society between a minister of foreign relations and a minister of the interior."
"And for preparation they have learned--"
"To roll off scales, to shine in trills, to shift their wrists. Prestidigitation instructs in housekeeping."
"Decidedly, you Europeans have a fine logic. And the eighth girl, the one who does not become a hand-organ?"
"The piano forms her too. It answers for everything, everywhere. Beneficent machine!"
"It exalts and refines. Mendelssohn surrounds them with ardent, delicate, morbid imaginings. Rossini fills their nerves with an expansive and voluptuous joy. The sharp, tormented desires, the broken, rebel cries of modern passions, rise from every strain of Meyerbeer. Mozart awakens in them a swarm of affections and dim longings. They live in a cloud of emotions and sensations."
"Not a bit of it. Literature is a living psychology, { 452}painting a living physiology. Music alone invents all, copies nothing, is a pure dream, gives free rein to dreams."
"With all the ardor of their ignorance, their sex, imagination, idleness, and their twenty years."
"Well, of evenings they have the poetry of the family and the world for pasture."
"In the evening, a night-capped gentleman, their husband, talks to them of his reports and his practice. The children in their cradle are spoiled or grumble. The cook brings her account. They bow to fifteen men in their _salon_, and compliment fifteen ladies on their dresses. In addition, once in awhile, the penitential and funereal ceremony you saw three days ago."
"But then the piano seems chosen expressly."
"To resign them at the outset to the meanness of a commonplace condition, the nothingness of the feminine condition, the wretchedness of the human condition. It is plain that all will be content, that none will become languishing or sharp. Dear and beneficent instrument! Salute it with respect, when you enter a room. It is the source of domestic concord, of feminine patience and conjugal bliss."