that Madame Courtade, whom the Captain had
unearthed in an ecclesiastical warehouse in the Faubourg Saint-Exupere,
and not yet twenty. They had begun by smiling at each other, and by
exchanging those long looks when they met, which seemed to ask for
charity.

Montboron used to pass in front of the shop at the same hours, stopped
for a moment with the appearance of a lounger who was loitering about the
streets, but immediately her supple figure appeared, pink and fair,
shedding the brightness of youth and almost childhood round her, while
her looks showed that she was delighted at little gallant incidents which
dispelled the monotony and weariness of her life for a time, and gave
rise to vague but delightful hopes.

Was love, that love which she had so constantly invoked, really knocking
at her door at last, and taking pity on her unhappy isolation? Did that
officer, whom she met whenever she went out, as if he had been faithfully
watching her, when coming out of church, or when out for a walk in the
evening, who said so many delightful things to her with his wheedling
eyes, really love her as she wished to be loved, or was he merely amusing
himself at that game, because he had nothing better to do in their quiet
little town?

But in a short time he wrote to her, and she replied to him, and at last
they managed to meet in secret, to make appointments, and talk together.

She knew all the cunning tricks of a simple girl, who has tasted the most
delicious of sweets with the tip of her tongue, and acting in concert,
and giving each other the word, so that there might be no awkward
mistake, they managed to make the husband their unwitting accomplice,
without his having the least idea of what was going on.

Courtade was an excellent fellow, who saw no further than the tip of his
nose, incapable of rebelling, flabby, fat, steeped in devotion, and
thinking too much about heaven to see what a plot was being hatched
against him, in our unhappy vale of tears, as the psalters say.

In the good old days of confederacies, he would have made an excellent
chief of a corporation; he loved his wife more like a father than a
husband, considering that at his age a man ought no longer to think of
such trifles, and that, after all, the only real happiness in life was
to keep a good table and to have a good digestion, and so he ate like
four canons, and drank in proportion.

Only once during his whole life had he shown anything like en