NINTH.
In the evening our creole, who had been thinking, said to Paul:
"Since you are such musicians in France, your well-educated girls must all learn music?”
“Three hours of scales every day, for thirteen years, from seven to twenty; total, fourteen thousand hours.”
“They profit by it?”
“One out of eight; of the other seven, three become good hand-organs, four poor hand-or-gans.”
“I suppose for a compensation they are made to read?”
“Le Ragois, La Harpe, and other dictionaries, all sorts of little treatises of florid piety.”
“What then is your education?”
“A pretty case embalmed with incense, perfumed, securely padlocked, where the mind sleeps while the finders turn a bird-organ.”
“Well, that is encouraging for the husband. And what does he do?”
“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?”
“Perhaps so.”
“For instance?”
“An apartment, third floor, costs two thousand francs, the dress of the wife fifteen hundred, the 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.”
“What then is marriage with you?”
“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!”
“How is that?”
“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.”
“The other arts would do as much.”
“Not a bit of it. Literature is a living psychology, painting a living physiology. Music alone invents all, copies nothing, is a pure dream, gives free rein to dreams.”
“And probably they strike out into it.”
“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.”
“Saint Jacques, I swear that my wife shall not know music!”
“You are making bachelor’s vows, my dear friend. Nowadays every girl who wears gloves has made her fingers run over that machine; otherwise she would think herself no better than a washerwoman.”
“I will marry my washerwoman.”
“The day after your wedding she will have a piano brought in.”
Paul has sprained his foot and spent two days in his room, occupied in watching a poultry yard. He improved the occasion by writing the following little treatise for the use of the young creole, a sort of viaticum, with which he will nourish himself for the better understanding of the world. I thought the treatise melancholy and skeptical. Paul replies, that one should be so at first, in order not to be afterward, and that it is well to be a little skeptical if you wish not to be too skeptical.
