r 'nerves', and
the husband ends by giving way and promising everything for the sake of
peace and permission to sleep.

Sleep! Never had he so much felt the need of it as now, at the end of
his long day of emotion and fatigue, and the darkness of his study as he
entered seemed the beginning of rest--when in the angle of the window he
dimly distinguished a human figure.

'Well, I hope you are satisfied.' It was his wife! She was on the look
out for him, waiting, and her angry voice stopped him short in the dark
to listen. 'You have won your cause; you insisted on making yourself
a mockery, and you have done it--daubed and drenched yourself with
ridicule, till you won't be able to show yourself again! Much reason you
had to cry out that your son was disgracing you, to insult and to curse
your son! Poor boy, it is well he has changed his name, now that yours
has become so identified with ignorance and gullibility that no one will
be able to utter it without a smile. And all this, if you please,
for the sake of your historical work! Why, you foolish man, who knows
anything about your historical work? Who can possibly care whether your
documents are genuine or forged? You know that nobody reads you.'

She went on and on, pouring out a thin stream of voice in her shrillest
tone; and he felt as if he were back again in the pillory, listening to
the official abuse as he had done all day, without interrupting, without
even a threatening gesture, swallowing the insults as he had in court,
and feeling that the authority was above attack and the judge one not to
be answered. But how cruel was this invisible mouth which bit him, and
wounded him all over, and slowly mangled in its teeth his pride as a man
and a writer!

His books, indeed! Did he suppose that they had got him into the
Academie? Why, it was to his wife alone that he owed his green coat! She
had spent her life in plotting and manoeuvring to break open one door
after another; sacrificed all her youth to such intrigues, and such
intriguers, as made her sick with disgust. 'Why, my dear, I had to! The
Academie is attained by talent, of which you have none, or a great
name, or a high position. You had none of these things. So I came to the
rescue.' And that there might be no mistake about it, that he might not
attribute what she said only to the exasperation of a woman wounded
and humiliated in her wifely pride and her blind maternal devotion, she
recalled the details of