"I do not acknowledge Madame de Palme as my neighbor."
"That's convenient! Madame de Palme, sir, has been badly brought up, badly married, and always spoilt; but, believe me, she is a genuine rough diamond."
"I only see the roughness."
"And rest assured that it only requires a skillful workman—I mean a good husband—to cut and polish it."
"Allow me to pity that future lapidary."
Madame de Malouet tapped the carpet with her foot, and manifested other signs of impatience, which I knew not at first how to interpret, for she is never out of humor; but suddenly a thought, which I took for a luminous one, occurred in my mind; I had no doubt that I had at last discovered the weak side and the only failing in that charming old woman. She was possessed with the mania of match making, and, in her Christian anxiety to snatch the Little Countess from the abyss of perdition, she was secretly meditating to hurl me into it with her, unworthy though I be. Penetrated with this modest conviction, I kept upon a defensive that seems to me, at the present moment, perfectly ridiculous.
"Mon Dieu!" said Madame de Malouet, "because you doubt her learning!"
"I do not doubt her learning," I said; "I doubt whether she knows how to read."
"But, in short, what fault do you find with her?" rejoined Madame de Malouet in a singularly agitated tone of voice.
I determined to demolish, at a single stroke, the matrimonial dream with which I supposed the marchioness to be deluding herself.