once by
a look charged with passion, "why, my dear boy, I am married; we are in
Paris, not in the savannah, the pampas, the backwoods of America.--My
dear Henri, my first and only love, listen to me. That husband of mine,
a second clerk in the War Office, is bent on being a head-clerk and
officer of the Legion of Honor; can I help his being ambitious? Now for
the very reason that made him leave us our liberty--nearly four years
ago, do you remember, you bad boy?--he now abandons me to Monsieur
Hulot. I cannot get rid of that dreadful official, who snorts like a
grampus, who has fins in his nostrils, who is sixty-three years old, and
who had grown ten years older by dint of trying to be young; who is so
odious to me that the very day when Marneffe is promoted, and gets his
Cross of the Legion of Honor----"

"How much more will your husband get then?"

"A thousand crowns."

"I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will
leave Paris and go----"

"Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman
makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we can
live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die out in
a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the only man
I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in your tiger's
brain."

For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that he
is a lion with a will of iron.

"Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he is
rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the twelve
in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in flannel; in
short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and may be cut off
at any moment. An illness that would not harm another man would be fatal
to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined at the root. For five
years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is poisonous! Some day,
and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow. Well, then, I--who have
already had an offer from a man with sixty thousand francs a year, I who
am as completely mistress of that man as I am of this lump of sugar--I
swear to you that if you were as poor as Hulot and as foul as Marneffe,
if you beat me even, still you are the only man I will have for a
husband, the only man I love, or whose name I will ever bear. And I am
ready to give any pledge of my love that you may require."

"Well, then, to-nigh