"Your little mouth, your little hands, your big eyes!"
All this often saddened me,—I don't know why,—saddened me to the point of tears. Yes, this strange house, in which all the beings in it, the silent old butler, William, and myself, seemed to me disquieting, empty, and dismal, like phantoms, sometimes filled me with unspeakable and oppressive melancholy.
The last scene that I witnessed was particularly droll.
One morning Monsieur entered the dressing-room at the moment when Madame was trying on a new corset in my presence, a frightful mauve satin corset with yellow flowerets and yellow silk lacings. Madame's taste will never choke her.
"What?" said Madame, in a tone of gay reproach. "Is that the way one enters women's rooms, without knocking?"
"Oh! women?" chirped Monsieur. "In the first place, you are not women."
"I am not women? What am I, then?"
Monsieur rounded his lips,—My! what a stupid air he had!—and very tenderly, or pretending tenderness, he buzzed:
"Why! you are my wife, my little wife, my pretty little wife. There is no harm in entering the room of one's little wife, I suppose."
When Monsieur played the imbecile lover, it was because he wanted to get some money out of Madame. She, still suspicious, replied: