dows, jumps hedges and ditches, kicks, and whinnies joyously, and
rolls about in the long, sweet grass.

But Dupontel remained quite imperturbable; he had not the slightest
suspicion, and was the first to laugh when anybody told him some good
story of a husband who had been cuckolded, although his wife repelled
him, quarreled with him, and constantly pretended to be out of sorts or
tired out, in order to escape from him. She seemed to take a malicious
pleasure in checkmating him by her personal remarks, her disenchanting
answers, and her apparent listlessness.

They saw a great deal of company, and he called himself Du Pontel now,
and he even had thoughts of buying a title from the Pope; he only read
certain newspapers, kept up a regular correspondence with the Orleans
Princes, was thinking of starting a racing stable, and finished up by
believing that he really was a fashionable man, and strutted about, and
was puffed out with conceit, as he had probably never read La Fontaine's
fable, in which he tells the story of the ass that is laden with relics
which people salute, and so takes their bows to himself.

Suddenly, however, anonymous letters disturbed his quietude, and tore
the bandage from his eyes.

At first he tore them up without reading them, and shrugged his
shoulders disdainfully; but he received so many of them, and the writer
seemed so determined to dot his _i's_ and cross his _t's_ and to clear
his brain for him, that the unhappy man began to grow disturbed, and to
watch and to ferret about. He instituted minute inquiries, and arrived
at the conclusion that he no longer had the right to make fun of other
husbands, and that he was the perfect counterpart of _Sganarelle_.[20]

[Footnote 20: The _Cocu Imaginaire_ (The Imaginary Cuckold), in
Moliere's play of that name.]

Furious at having been duped, he set a whole private inquiry agency to
work, continually acted a part, and one evening appeared unexpectedly
with a commissary of police in the snug little bachelor's quarters which
concealed his wife's escapades.

Therese, who was terribly frightened, and at her wits' end at being thus
surprised in all the disorder of her lover's apartments, and pale with
shame and terror, hid herself behind the bed curtains, while he, who was
an officer of dragoons, very much vexed at being mixed up in such a
pinchbeck scandal, and at being caught in a silk shirt by these men who
were so correctly dressed in frock coats,