You have put your triumphant idea of taking your family to ride into execution. You left your home in the morning, all the opposite neighbors having come to their windows, envying you the privilege which your means give you of going to the country and coming back again without undergoing the miseries of a public conveyance. So you have dragged your unfortunate Norman horse through Paris to Vincennes, from Vincennes to Saint Maur, from Saint Maur to Charenton, from Charenton opposite some island or other which struck your wife and mother-in-law as being prettier than all the landscapes through which you had driven them.
“Let’s go to Maison’s!” somebody exclaims.
So you go to Maison’s, near Alfort. You come home by the left bank of the Seine, in the midst of a cloud of very black Olympian dust. The horse drags your family wearily along. But alas! your pride has fled, and you look without emotion upon his sunken flanks, and upon two bones which stick out on each side of his belly. His coat is roughened by the sweat which has repeatedly come out and dried upon him, and which, no less than the dust, has made him gummy, sticky and shaggy. The horse looks like a wrathy porcupine: you are afraid he will be foundered, and you caress him with the whip-lash in a melancholy way that he perfectly understands, for he moves his head about like an omnibus horse, tired of his deplorable existence.
You think a good deal of this horse; your consider him an excellent one and he cost you twelve hundred francs. When a man has the honor of being the father of a family, he thinks as much of twelve hundred francs as you think of this horse. You see at once the frightful amount of your extra expenses, in case Coco should have to lie by. For two days you will have to take hackney coaches to go to your business. You wife will pout if she can’t go out: but she will go out, and take a carriage. The horse will cause the purchase of numerous extras, which you will find in your coachman’s bill,—your only coachman, a model coachman, whom you watch as you do a model anybody.
To these thoughts you give expression in the gentle movement of the whip as it falls upon the animal’s ribs, up to his knees in the black dust which lines the road in front of La Verrerie.
At this moment, little Adolphe, who doesn’t know what to do in this rolling box, has sadly twisted himself up into a corner, and his grandmother anxiously asks him, “What is the matter?”
“I’m hungry,” says the child.
“He’s hungry,” says the mother to her daughter.
“And why shouldn’t he be hungry? It is half-past five, we are not at the barrier, and we started at two!”
“Your husband might have treated us to dinner in the country.”