"In truth, madame," he says with acrimony as he enters his wife's room, where she is finishing her toilette, "you seem to have lost your habitual tact. This is a nice time to be giving dinner parties! Twenty persons will soon learn—"
"That you are director-general!" she cries, showing him a royal despatch.
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: