"Philippic is better."
"Well, either. I'll say anything you like, for I was perfectly furious, and I don't remember what I screamed in the desert of my bedroom. Do you suppose that this opinion that husbands have of their wives, the parts they give them, is not a singular vexation for us? Our petty troubles are always pregnant with greater ones. My Adolphe needed a lesson. You know the Vicomte de Lustrac, a desperate amateur of women and music, an epicure, one of those ex-beaux of the Empire, who live upon their earlier successes, and who cultivate themselves with excessive care, in order to secure a second crop?"
"Yes," I said, "one of those laced, braced, corseted old fellows of sixty, who work such wonders by the grace of their forms, and who might give a lesson to the youngest dandies among us."
"Monsieur de Lustrac is as selfish as a king, but gallant and pretentious, spite of his jet black wig."
"As to his whiskers, he dyes them."
"He goes to ten parties in an evening: he's a butterfly."
"He gives capital dinners and concerts, and patronizes inexperienced songstresses."
"He takes bustle for pleasure."
"Yes, but he makes off with incredible celerity whenever a misfortune occurs. Are you in mourning, he avoids you. Are you confined, he awaits your churching before he visits you. He possesses a mundane frankness and a social intrepidity which challenge admiration."
"But does it not require courage to appear to be what one really is?"
I asked.