“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.”