He is thunderstruck. He takes the letter, he turns it now one way, now another; he opens it. He sits down and spreads it out.
“I well know,” he says, “that justice would be rendered me under whatever ministers I served.”
“Yes, my dear! But M. Villeplaine has answered for you with his life, and his eminence the Cardinal de ——- of whom he is the—”
“M. de Villeplaine?”
This is such a munificent recompense, that the husband adds with the smile of a director-general:
“Why, deuce take it, my dear, this is your doing!”
“Ah! don’t thank me for it; Adolphe did it from personal attachment to you.”
On a certain evening a poor husband was kept at home by a pouring rain, or tired, perhaps, of going to spend his evening in play, at the cafe, or in the world, and sick of all this he felt himself carried away by an impulse to follow his wife to the conjugal chamber. There he sank into an arm-chair and like any sultan awaited his coffee, as if he would say:
“Well, after all, she is my wife!”
The fair siren herself prepares the favorite draught; she strains it with special care, sweetens it, tastes it, and hands it to him; then, with a smile, she ventures like a submissive odalisque to make a joke, with a view to smoothing the wrinkles on the brow of her lord and master. Up to that moment he had thought his wife stupid; but on hearing a sally as witty as that which even you would cajole with, madame, he raises his head in the way peculiar to dogs who are hunting the hare.