“Yes and no. I know them by sight, but I don’t care to know them.”
“But why? They look very pleasant.”
“Because …”
“I met the husband this morning on the terrace and we took a couple of turns together.”
Realising that there was danger in the air, Bondel added:
“It was he who accosted me and spoke first.”
His wife regarded him with displeasure. She replied:
“You could easily have avoided him.”
“But why?”
“Because people are talking about them.”
“Talking! Good heavens, people are always talking.”
M. Bondel made the mistake of becoming quite emphatic:
“My dearest, you know that I have a horror of talk. The fact that they are being talked about is enough to make me take a liking to people. As for these people, I find them very pleasant, myself.”
She demanded furiously:
“The wife too, I suppose?”
“God, yes, the wife too, although I’ve hardly seen her.”
And the discussion continued, becoming slowly more and more venomous and implacably fastened on one subject from sheer lack of other interests.
Mme. Bondel obstinately refused to say what sort of talk was going the rounds about these neighbours, leaving it to be understood that quite dreadful things, which she did not specify, were being said. Bondel shrugged his shoulders, sneered, exasperated his wife. She ended by shouting:
“Well, your gentleman is a cuckold, that’s what!”
Her husband answered unemotionally:
“I don’t see in what way that affects a man’s good name.”
She seemed stupefied.
“What, you don’t see it? … you don’t see it? … upon my word, that’s too much … you don’t see it? But it’s a public scandal: he’s hurt by the mere fact of being a cuckold!”
He answered:
“Not at all. Is a man hurt because he’s deceived, hurt because he’s betrayed, hurt because he’s robbed? … Not at all. I agree with you as far as his wife is concerned, but as for him …”
She became furious.
“He’s as much in it as she. They’re ruined, it’s a public disgrace.”
Bondel, very calm, asked:
“First, is it true? Who can assert such a thing, short of taking them in the act?”
Mme. Bondel bounced in her chair.
“What? Who can assert it? Why, everyone! everyone! A thing like that is as plain as the nose on your face. Everyone knows it, everyone talks about it. There’s no question about it. It’s as well known as a public holiday.”
He sniggered.
“And for a long time people believed that the sun moved round the earth, and a thousand other equally well-known things, which were untrue. This man adores his wife; he talks about her with affection and respect. It’s not true.”
She stammered, stamping her foot:
“And considering what he knows, fool, half-wit, defrauded wretch that he is!”
Bondel did not lose his temper; he argued:
“Pardon me. The man is not stupid. He seemed to me, on the contrary, exceptionally intelligent and very acute; and you won’t make me believe that an intelligent man would not notice such a thing in his house when his neighbours, who are not there in his house, are conversant with every detail of this adultery, for I’ll warrant they are conversant with every detail.”
Mme. Bondel gave way to a spasm of angry mirth that jarred her husband’s nerves.
“Oh! oh! oh! You’re all alike, all of you! As if there was a single man in the world who would find it out, unless one rubbed his nose in it.”
The discussion took another form. She became heated on the question of the blindness of deceived husbands, which he called in doubt and she asserted with an air of such personal scorn that he finally lost his temper.
The quarrel became a violent one in which she took the side of women and he defended men.
He had the folly to declare:
“Well, I take my oath that if I had been deceived, I should have seen it, and at once too. And I would have cured you of your fancy in such a fashion that it would have needed more than a doctor to put you on your feet again.”
She was transported with rage and shouted in his face:
“You? You! Why, you’re as stupid as any of them, do you hear?”
He asserted again:
“I take my oath I’m not.”
She burst into so impudent a laugh that he felt his pulses quicken and his skin creep.
For the third time, he said:
“I should have seen it, I should!”
She got up, still laughing in the same way.
“No, it’s too much,” she got out.
And she went out, slamming the door.
II
Bondel felt baffled, very ill at ease. That insolent provocative laughter had affected him like the sting of one of those venomous flies which we do not feel at first, but which very soon begin to smart and hurt intolerably.
He went out, and walked about, brooding over it. The solitary nature of his new life disposed him to think unhappy thoughts and to take a gloomy view of things. The neighbour whom he had that morning met suddenly approached him. They shook hands and began to talk. After touching on various subjects, they began to talk about their wives. Each of them seemed to have something to confide, some inexpressible, vague and painful thing concerning the very nature of this creature associated with his life: a woman.
The neighbour said:
“You know, one would really think that women sometimes feel a kind of peculiar hostility against their husbands, for no other reason than that they are their husbands. Take me. I love my wife. I love her dearly. I appreciate her and respect her. Well, she sometimes seems to feel more at home and intimate with our friends than with me.”
Bondel thought at once: “There you are, my wife was right.”
When he had parted from the man, he began thinking again. He was conscious of a confused medley of contradictory thoughts in his mind, a sort of unhappy agitation, and his ear still rang with that impudent laughter, an exasperated laughter that seemed to say: “You’re in the same boat as the others, you fool.” Of course it was nothing but a gesture of defiance,
