ending them all to
Coventry. No peasant ever set foot in his cottage, although Bistaud's
wife kept a small shop and was a handsome woman, and the only persons
who went there were the custom-house officers. The others took their
revenge on them all by saying that the man with the dogs sold his wife
to the custom-house officers, like he did his dogs.

"He keeps her for them, as well as his dogs," they said jeeringly. "You
can see that he is a born cuckold with his yellow beard and eyebrows,
which stick up like a pair of horns."

His hair was certainly red, or rather yellow, his thick eyebrows were
turned up in two points on his temples, and he used to twirl them
mechanically as if they had been a pair of moustaches. And certainly,
with his hair like that, and with his long beard and shaggy eyebrows,
with his sallow face, blinking eyes, and dull looks, with his dogged
mouth, thin lips, and his miserable, deformed body, he was not a
pleasing object.

But he assuredly was not a complaisant cuckold, and those who have said
that of him had never seen him at home. On the contrary, he was always
jealous, and kept as sharp a lookout on his wife as he did on his dogs,
and if he had broken her in at all, it was to be as faithful to him as
they were.

She was a handsome, and what they call in the country, a fine body of a
woman; tall, well-built, with a full bust and broad breech, and she
certainly made more than one excise man squint at her, but it was no use
for them to come and sniff round her too closely, or else there would
have been blows. At least, that is what the custom-house officers said
when anybody joked with them and said to them: "That does not matter, no
doubt, you and she have hunted for your fleas together."

It was no use for them to defend Madame Bistaud's fierce virtue; nobody
believed them, and the only answer they got was: "You are hiding your
game, and are ashamed of going to seduce a woman who belongs to such a
wretched creature."

And, certainly, nobody would have believed that such a buxom woman, who
looked as if her crupper were as warm as her looks, and who assuredly
must have liked to be well attended to, could be satisfied with such a
puny husband; with such an ugly, weak, red-headed fellow, who smelled of
his own hair and of the mustiness of the carrion which he gave to his
hounds.

But they did not know that "the man with the dogs" had some years before
given her, once for all, a lesson in f