“You make a good choice, when you like.”
“I do what I can,” he said as he nodded his head.
“I am asking myself,” I continued, “with mistresses of such beauty——”
“One mistress,” he corrected me. “Madam de Bonnivet is not my mistress.”
“It comes to the same thing, as far as it concerns what I am going to say. I am asking myself, how you manage to escape scandal.”
“I am like Proudhon,” he replied with a laugh, “whom Hugo pretended had the skin of a toad in his pocket. It appears that this charm protects one from every danger.”
“Do you think your luck will hold? Then what of the women themselves?”
“Larcher has an axiom: 'a woman is the best antidote against another woman.’”
“But the result of that is spiteful vengeance, vitriol, and the revolver. One of these two women, I should not trust.”
As I said that, I pointed with my cane to Madam Bonnivet.