m a home, a sweet, pleasant home where every one takes care
of you and spoils you, from the husband to the servants. One finds
everything combined there, love, friendship, even fatherly interest, bed
and board, all, in fact, that constitutes the happiness of life, with
this incalculable advantage, that one can change one's family from time
to time, take up one's abode in all kinds of society in turn: in summer,
in the country with the workman who rents you a room in his house;
in winter with the townsfolk, or even with the nobility, if one is
ambitious.

I have another weakness; it is that I become attached to the husband
as well as the wife. I acknowledge even that some husbands, ordinary
or coarse as they may be, give me a feeling of disgust for their wives,
however charming they may be. But when the husband is intellectual or
charming I invariably become very much attached to him. I am careful if
I quarrel with the wife not to quarrel with the husband. In this way I
have made some of my best friends, and have also proved in many cases
the incontestable superiority of the male over the female in the human
species. The latter makes all sorts of trouble-scenes, reproaches, etc.;
while the former, who has just as good a right to complain, treats
you, on the contrary, as though you were the special Providence of his
hearth.

Well, my friend was a quaint little woman, a brunette, fanciful,
capricious, pious, superstitious, credulous as a monk, but charming. She
had a way of kissing one that I never saw in any one else--but that was
not the attraction--and such a soft skin! It gave me intense delight
merely to hold her hands. And an eye--her glance was like a slow caress,
delicious and unending. Sometimes I would lean my head on her knee
and we would remain motionless, she leaning over me with that subtle,
enigmatic, disturbing smile that women have, while my eyes would be
raised to hers, drinking sweetly and deliciously into my heart, like
a form of intoxication, the glance of her limpid blue eyes, limpid as
though they were full of thoughts of love, and blue as though they were
a heaven of delights.

Her husband, inspector of some large public works, was frequently away
from home and left us our evenings free. Sometimes I spent them with her
lounging on the divan with my forehead on one of her knees; while on
the other lay an enormous black cat called "Misti," whom she adored. Our
fingers would meet on the cat's back a