- How wouldst thou have laugh'd and moralized upon my new
profession! - and thou shouldst have laugh'd and moralized on. -
Trust me, my dear Eugenius, I should have said, "There are worse
occupations in this world THAN FEELING A WOMAN'S PULSE." - But a
grisette's! thou wouldst have said, - and in an open shop! Yorick -
- So much the better: for when my views are direct, Eugenius, I
care not if all the world saw me feel it.
THE HUSBAND. PARIS.
I had counted twenty pulsations, and was going on fast towards the
fortieth, when her husband, coming unexpected from a back parlour
into the shop, put me a little out of my reckoning. - 'Twas nobody
but her husband, she said; - so I began a fresh score. - Monsieur is
so good, quoth she, as he pass'd by us, as to give himself the
trouble of feeling my pulse. - The husband took off his hat, and
making me a bow, said, I did him too much honour - and having said
that, he put on his hat and walk'd out.
Good God! said I to myself, as he went out, - and can this man be
the husband of this woman!
Let it not torment the few who know what must have been the grounds
of this exclamation, if I explain it to those who do not.
In London a shopkeeper and a shopkeeper's wife seem to be one bone
and one flesh: in the several endowments of mind and body,
sometimes the one, sometimes the other has it, so as, in general,
to be upon a par, and totally with each other as nearly as man and
wife need to do.
In Paris, there are scarce two orders of beings more different:
for the legislative and executive powers of the shop not resting in
the husband, he seldom comes there: - in some dark and dismal room
behind, he sits commerce-less, in his thrum nightcap, the same
rough son of Nature that Nature left him.
The genius of a people, where nothing but the monarchy is salique,
having ceded this department, with sundry others, totally to the
women, - by a continual higgling with customers of all ranks and
sizes from morning to night, like so many rough pebbles shook long
together in a bag, by amicable collisions they have worn down their
asperities and sharp angles, and not only become round and smooth,
but will receive, some of them, a polish like a brilliant: -
Monsieur le Mari is little better than the stone under your foot.
- Surely, - surely, man! it is not good for thee to sit alone: -
thou wast made for social intercourse and gentle greetings; and
this improvement of our natures from it I appeal to as my evidence.
