did not come before her regular hour: I looked at the clock all the time, watching the hands impatiently. The quarter passed, then the half-hour, then two o’clock … I could bear it no longer and strode up and down my room, gluing my forehead to the window, and my ear to the door to listen whether she was coming up the stairs.
“Half past two, three o’clock! I put on my hat and rushed to see her. She was reading a novel, my dear fellow!
“ ‘Well,’ I said, anxiously.
“She replied as calmly as usual:
“ ‘I was prevented, and could not come.’
“ ‘What prevented you?’
“ ‘Oh … other things.’
“ ‘But … what other things?’
“ ‘A tiresome visitor.’
“Of course I immediately thought that she knew everything; but she seemed so placid, so peaceful, that I set aside my suspicions in favour of some strange coincidence, I could not believe in such hypocrisy. After an hour of friendly conversation, interrupted at least a dozen times by her little girl’s appearance, I went away very much perplexed. Just imagine, the next day …”
“The same thing happened?”
“Yes … and the day following, too. This lasted for three weeks without any explanation, without anything to enlighten me as to this strange behaviour, of which, however, I suspected the secret.
“They both knew?”
“Of course. But how? Ah! I was worried enough before I found out.”
“How did you find out at last?”
“From their letters. On the same day, in the same words, they gave me my dismissal.”
“Well?”
“Well, this is what happened. You know that women have always a large collection of pins about them. As for hairpins, I know all about them, I distrust them and look out for them, but the other pins are much more treacherous, those confounded little black-headed pins that all look alike to us, fools that we are, but which they can recognise as we can tell a horse from a dog.
“Well, evidently one day my little civil-service lady had left one of these telltale things stuck in the hangings near my looking-glass.
“My ‘habit’ lady had immediately seen the little black head, no bigger than a pea, in the hanging, and without saying a word had taken it out and stuck one of her own pins, black too, but a different shape, in the same spot.
“The next day the ‘civil service’ wished to recover her property, and immediately recognized the exchange that had been made. Then her suspicions were roused and she stuck two in the shape of a cross. My ‘habit’ replied to this telegraphic signal by three black heads, one above the other.
“Once they had begun this game, they went on without saying a word to each other, simply keeping watch. Then, apparently, the ‘habit,’ being more daring, rolled a thin piece of paper round the pin, on which was written: ‘C. D., Post Office, Boulevard Malesherbes.’
“Then they wrote to each other and I was done for. You can understand that it was not all easy going between them. They indulged in all kinds of trickery, were very cautious and as careful as such cases demand. Then my ‘habit’ did a bold thing and made an appointment with the other one. I don’t know what they said to each other! All I know is that I supplied the entertainment! That’s that!”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
“You never see them now?”
“I beg your pardon. I see them as friends, we have not broken off altogether.”
“And they, have they met again?”
“Yes, my dear chap, they have become intimate friends.”
“Well, well. And has that not given you an idea?”
“No, what?”
“You boob, the idea to make them stick a double lot of pins in the hanging again.”
Divorce
Maître Bontran, the celebrated Parisian lawyer, who for ten years had pleaded and won all divorce actions brought by ill-assorted couples, opened the door of his consulting-room and drew back to admit the new client.
He was a stout red-faced man with thick fair whiskers, corpulent, full-blooded and vigorous. He bowed.
“Please be seated,” said the lawyer.
The client sat down, coughed and said:
“I have come to ask you, sir, to act for me in a divorce case.”
“Please go on, I am listening.”
“I was formerly a notary.”
“Retired already?”
“Yes, already. I am thirty-seven years old.”
“Go on.”
“I have made an unfortunate marriage, very unfortunate.”
“You are not the only one.”
“I know it, and I sympathise with the others, but my case is quite unique, and my complaints against my wife are of a very peculiar nature. But I will begin at the beginning. I married in a very strange way. Do you believe in dangerous ideas?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Do you believe that certain ideas may be as dangerous for certain minds as poison for the body?”
“Well, yes, perhaps.”
“I am sure of it. There are ideas that enter into us, gnaw us, kill us, madden us, if we are unable to resist them. It’s a sort of spiritual phylloxera. If we are unfortunate enough to let one of these thoughts creep into our minds, if we don’t in the instant of its entry realise that it is an invader, a master, a tyrant, that hour by hour and day by day it takes firmer hold on us, returns again and again, roots itself in, drives out all our usual preoccupations, absorbs all our attention and changes the angle of our judgment, we are lost.
“Listen to what has happened to me. As I have told you, I was a notary in Rouen, and in rather tight circumstances, not poor, but pinched for money, always careful, forced to economise the whole time, obliged to limit all my desires, yes, all! and that’s hard at my age.
“In my capacity as a notary, I used to read with great care the announcements on the fourth page of the newspaper, the Offered and Wanted columns, the personal columns, etc., etc.; and it often happened that I was enabled by these means to arrange advantageous marriages for some clients.
“One day I came across this one:
“ ‘Young lady, pretty, well educated, of good birth, with a dowry of two and a
