enough to cut her throat. I
wanted to, and I have never succeeded, never. And always the horrible
laugh makes fun of me, always, always."

And with a deluge of tears, with something like a roar of unsatiated and
muzzled rage, he ground his teeth as he wound up: "She knows me, the
jade; she is in the secret of my work, of my patience, of my trick,
routine, whatever you may call it! She lives in my innermost being, and
sees into it more closely than you do, or than I do myself. She knows
what a faultless machine I have become, the machine of which she makes
fun, the machine which is too well wound up, the machine which cannot
get out of order, and she knows that I _cannot_ make a mistake."

MADEMOISELLE FIFI

The Major, Graf von Farlsberg, the Prussian commandant, was reading his
newspaper, lying back in a great armchair, with his booted feet on the
beautiful marble fire-place, where his spurs had made two holes, which
grew deeper every day, during the three months that he had been in the
chateau of Urville.

A cup of coffee was smoking on a small, inlaid table, which was stained
with liquors, burnt by cigars, notched by the pen-knife of the
victorious officer, who occasionally would stop while sharpening a
pencil, to jot down figures, or to make a drawing on it, just as it took
his fancy.

When he had read his letters and the German newspapers, which his
baggage-master had brought him, he got up, and after throwing three or
four enormous pieces of green wood on to the fire, for those gentlemen
were gradually cutting down the park in order to keep themselves warm,
he went to the window. The rain was descending in torrents, a regular
Normandy rain, which looked as if it were being poured out by some
furious hand, a slanting rain, which was as thick as a curtain, and
which formed a kind of wall with oblique stripes, and which deluged
everything, a regular rain, such as one frequently experiences in the
neighborhood of Rouen, which is the watering-pot of France.

For a long time the officer looked at the sodden turf, and at the
swollen Andelle beyond it, which was overflowing its banks; and he was
drumming a waltz from the Rhine on the window-panes, with his fingers,
when a noise made him turn round; it was his second in command, Captain
Baron von Kelweinstein.

The major was a giant, with broad shoulders, and a long, fair-like
beard, which hung like a cloth on his chest. His whole, solemn person
suggested