Jacques had reached that degree of drunkenness which is not madness, which leaves the mind even quite clear, but which renders the will implacable; he did not at first reply to the question of Marie, who said again:
"Please, monsieur, I beg you, tell me what you wish of me."
Jacques, both hands in the pockets of his blouse, stood directly in front of his wife; sometimes he knit his eyebrows with a sinister expression as he stared at her, sometimes he smiled with a satirical air.
Finally, addressing Marie with a slow and uncertain voice, for his half-drunken condition retarded his utterance and obliged him to make frequent pauses, he said to her:
"Madame it is about seventeen years and a half that we have been married, is it not?"
"Yes, monsieur."
"What good have you been to me?"
"Monsieur!"
"You have not even served me as a wife."
Marie, her cheeks coloured with shame and indignation, started to go out.