e and Tibullus to
him. On returning home he sees the table laid as if to receive the
most influential men of the assembly.

"In truth, madame," he says with acrimony as he enters his wife's
room, where she is finishing her toilette, "you seem to have lost your
habitual tact. This is a nice time to be giving dinner parties! Twenty
persons will soon learn--"

"That you are director-general!" she cries, showing him a royal
despatch.

He is thunderstruck. He takes the letter, he turns it now one way, now
another; he opens it. He sits down and spreads it out.

"I well know," he says, "that justice would be rendered me under
whatever ministers I served."

"Yes, my dear! But M. Villeplaine has answered for you with his life,
and his eminence the Cardinal de ----- of whom he is the--"

"M. de Villeplaine?"

This is such a munificent recompense, that the husband adds with the
smile of a director-general:

"Why, deuce take it, my dear, this is your doing!"

"Ah! don't thank me for it; Adolphe did it from personal attachment to
you."

On a certain evening a poor husband was kept at home by a pouring
rain, or tired, perhaps, of going to spend his evening in play, at the
cafe, or in the world, and sick of all this he felt himself carried
away by an impulse to follow his wife to the conjugal chamber. There
he sank into an arm-chair and like any sultan awaited his coffee, as
if he would say:

"Well, after all, she is my wife!"

The fair siren herself prepares the favorite draught; she strains it
with special care, sweetens it, tastes it, and hands it to him; then,
with a smile, she ventures like a submissive odalisque to make a joke,
with a view to smoothing the wrinkles on the brow of her lord and
master. Up to that moment he had thought his wife stupid; but on
hearing a sally as witty as that which even you would cajole with,
madame, he raises his head in the way peculiar to dogs who are hunting
the hare.

"Where the devil did she get that--but it's a random shot!" he says to
himself.

From the pinnacle of his own greatness he makes a piquant repartee.
Madame retorts, the conversation becomes as lively as it is
interesting, and this husband, a very superior man, is quite
astonished to discover the wit of his wife, in other respects, an
accomplished woman; the right word occurs to her with wonderful
readiness; her tact and keenness enable her to meet an innuendo with
charming originality. She is no longer the sam