teau.
"For some charity lottery, perhaps?"

"No," she said, "I think there is too much display in charity done to
the sound of a trumpet."

"You are very indiscreet," said Monsieur Gravier.

"Can there be any indiscretion," said Lousteau, "in inquiring who the
happy mortal may be in whose room that basket is to stand?"

"There is no happy mortal in the case," said Dinah; "it is for Monsieur
de la Baudraye."

The Public Prosecutor looked slily at Madame de la Baudraye and her
work, as if he had said to himself, "I have lost my paper-basket!"

"Why, madame, may we not think him happy in having a lovely wife, happy
in her decorating his paper-baskets so charmingly? The colors are red
and black, like Robin Goodfellow. If ever I marry, I only hope that
twelve years after, my wife's embroidered baskets may still be for me."

"And why should they not be for you?" said the lady, fixing her fine
gray eyes, full of invitation, on Etienne's face.

"Parisians believe in nothing," said the lawyer bitterly. "The virtue of
women is doubted above all things with terrible insolence. Yes, for some
time past the books you have written, you Paris authors, your farces,
your dramas, all your atrocious literature, turn on adultery--"

"Come, come, Monsieur the Public Prosecutor," retorted Etienne,
laughing, "I left you to play your game in peace, I did not attack you,
and here you are bringing an indictment against me. On my honor as a
journalist, I have launched above a hundred articles against the writers
you speak of; but I confess that in attacking them it was to attempt
something like criticism. Be just; if you condemn them, you must condemn
Homer, whose _Iliad_ turns on Helen of Troy; you must condemn Milton's
_Paradise Lost_. Eve and her serpent seem to me a pretty little case of
symbolical adultery; you must suppress the Psalms of David, inspired by
the highly adulterous love affairs of that Louis XIV. of Judah; you must
make a bonfire of _Mithridate, le Tartuffe, l'Ecole des Femmes, Phedre,
Andromaque, le Mariage de Figaro_, Dante's _Inferno_, Petrarch's
Sonnets, all the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the romances of the
Middle Ages, the History of France, and of Rome, etc., etc. Excepting
Bossuet's _Histoire des Variations_ and Pascal's _Provinciales_, I do
not think there are many books left to read if you insist on eliminating
all those in which illicit love is mentioned."

"Much loss that would be!" said Monsieur de C