treat him with some consideration."

"Consideration! So that is what you call it in these parts?" said the
journalist with a smile.

"I should suppose Madame de la Baudraye to have too much good taste to
trouble her head about that ugly ape," said Bianchon.

"Horace," said Lousteau, "look here, O learned interpreter of human
nature, let us lay a trap for the Public Prosecutor; we shall be doing
our friend Gatien a service, and get a laugh out of it. I do not love
Public Prosecutors."

"You have a keen intuition of destiny," said Horace. "But what can we
do?"

"Well, after dinner we will tell sundry little anecdotes of wives
caught out by their husbands, killed, murdered under the most terrible
circumstances.--Then we shall see the faces that Madame de la Baudraye
and de Clagny will make."

"Not amiss!" said Bianchon; "one or the other must surely, by look or
gesture--"

"I know a newspaper editor," Lousteau went on, addressing Gatien, "who,
anxious to forefend a grievous fate, will take no stories but such as
tell the tale of lovers burned, hewn, pounded, or cut to pieces; of
wives boiled, fried, or baked; he takes them to his wife to read, hoping
that sheer fear will keep her faithful--satisfied with that humble
alternative, poor man! 'You see, my dear, to what the smallest error may
lead you!' says he, epitomizing Arnolfe's address to Agnes."

"Madame de la Baudraye is quite guiltless; this youth sees double,"
said Bianchon. "Madame Piedefer seems to me far too pious to invite her
daughter's lover to the Chateau d'Anzy. Madame de la Baudraye would have
to hoodwink her mother, her husband, her maid, and her mother's maid;
that is too much to do. I acquit her."

"Well with more reason because her husband never 'quits her,'" said
Gatien, laughing at his own wit.

"We can easily remember two or three stories that will make Dinah
quake," said Lousteau. "Young man--and you too, Bianchon--let me beg you
to maintain a stern demeanor; be thorough diplomatists, an easy manner
without exaggeration, and watch the faces of the two criminals, you
know, without seeming to do so--out of the corner of your eye, or in a
glass, on the sly. This morning we will hunt the hare, this evening we
will hunt the Public Prosecutor."

The evening began with a triumph for Lousteau, who returned the album to
the lady with this elegy written in it:

SPLEEN

You ask for verse from me, the feeble prey
Of this self-seeking world