and that everything which
displeases our idealistic morality is classed by us an exception,
without taking into account that these exceptions all brought together
constitute nearly the total number of cases. There further results
from it that credulous good people like me are deceived by everybody
and especially by women, who have a talent in this direction.

"I have started far afield in order to come to the particular fact
which interests me. I have a mistress, a married woman. Like many
others, I imagined (do you understand?) that I had chanced on an
exception, on an unhappy little woman who was deceiving her husband
for the first time. I had paid attentions to her, or rather I had
looked on myself as having paid attention to her for a long time, as
having overcome her virtue by dint of kindness and love, and as having
triumphed by the sheer force of perseverance. In fact, I had made use
of a thousand precautions, a thousand devices, and a thousand subtle
dallyings in order to succeed in getting the better of her.

"Now here is what happened last week: Her husband being absent for
some days, she suggested that we should both dine together, and that I
should attend on myself so as to avoid the presence of a man-servant.
She had a fixed idea which had haunted her for the last four or five
months: She wanted to get tipsy, but to get tipsy altogether without
being afraid of consequences, without having to go back home, speak to
her chambermaid, and walk before witnesses. She had often obtained
what she called 'a gay agitation' without going farther, and she had
found it delightful. So then she promised herself that she would get
tipsy once, only once, but thoroughly so. She pretended at her own
house that she was going to spend twenty-four hours with some friends
near Paris, and she reached my abode just about dinner-hour.

"A woman naturally ought not to get fuddled except when she has had
too much champagne. She drinks a big glass of it fasting, and before
the oysters arrive, she begins to ramble in her talk.

"We had a cold dinner prepared on a table behind me. It was enough for
me to stretch out my arms to take the dishes or the plates, and I
attended on myself as best I could while I listened to her chattering.

"She kept swallowing glass after glass, haunted by her fixed idea. She
began by making me the recipient of meaningless and interminable
confidences with regard to her sensations as a young girl. She went