"You don't see! oh! certainly, you are so penetrating! you don't see that such a letter, from a libertine, from a débauché, from a Nebuchadnezzar like this Marquis of Létorière, is worse than an insult! for it is, so to speak, a premeditation and threat of insult!"
"How so, Martha?"
"Have you forgotten all that we have heard of this abominable man, who leaves behind him, they say, only ruined girls and guilty wives? . . . Don't you know that he is a Pharaoh, who thinks he can bewitch one with a glance . . . a kind of unbridled Tarquin, who the first time he meets a woman dares to address her in the most wicked language of gallantry?"
"The fact is, he is one of those brisk sparks whom husbands, fathers and mothers send to the devil twenty times a day. Ha, ha, ha!" answered the councillor, with a horse-laugh.
This fit of inopportune laughter was severely punished by the conseillère, who sharply pinched him, crying:
"And are you such a wretch that you can laugh like a fool when you have in your hand the proof that such a dissolute fellow perhaps intends to crown his infernal triumphs by attacking the honor of your wife? . . ."
The councillor looked at his wife wonderingly, clasping his hands:
"Attack your honor; Martha! Ah, good heavens! Who thought of that?"
"Oh! what a man! what a man! Listen, then!"
And the conseillère read the letter for the third time! . . .