you explain your present fortune? You are going to repeat again that you
have, worked very hard. But my poor friend, working day and night, with
all the patronage and the orders from government which have certainly
not been wanting to you since your marriage, you have never made more
than fifteen thousand francs (six hundred pounds) a year. Can you for
one moment suppose that was sufficient to keep up an establishment like
yours? Remember that the beautiful Madame Guillardin has always been
cited as a model of elegance, frequenting the richest society. Of course
I am well aware that shut up as you were from morning till night in your
studio, you never gave a thought to all this. You were satisfied with
saying to your friends: 'I have a wife who is a surprisingly skilful
manager. With what I gain, she not only pays our expenses, but manages
also to put by money.' It was you who were surprising, poor man! The
truth was that you had married one of those pretty little unscrupulous
creatures of which Paris is full, an ambitious flirt, serious in what
concerned your interests and unprejudiced in regard of her own, knowing
how to reconcile your affairs and her pleasures. The life of these
women, my dear fellow, resembles a dance programme in which sums would
be placed side by side with the dancers' names. Yours reasoned in the
following manner: 'My husband has no talent, no fortune, no good looks
either; but he is an excellent man, good-natured, credulous, as little
in the way as possible. Provided he leaves me free to amuse myself as
I choose, I can undertake to give him all he lacks!' And from that day
forth, money, orders, decorations from all countries kept pouring
in upon your studio, with their pretty metallic sound and their
many-coloured ribbons. Look at the row on my lapel. Then one fine
morning, Madame was seized with the fancy--a fancy of beauty on the
wane--to be the wife of an Academician, and it is her delicately
gloved hand that has opened before you one by one all the doors of the
sanctuary. Ah! my poor old fellow, your colleagues alone can tell you
what all these green palms have cost you!"

"You lie, you lie!" screamed Guillardin, half choked by indignation.

"Ah no! my old friend, indeed I do not lie. You need only to look
around you presently, when you enter the reception hall. You will see a
malicious gleam in every eye, a smile at the corner of every lip,
while they will whisper as you pass by: 'Here is