so; even more on that account, than for
having deceived me. For that is a natural fault, is it not, and may be
pardoned? But the other thing was a crime, a horrible crime."

The woman who stood against the wooden target every night with her arms
stretched out and her fingers extended, and whom the old mountebank
fitted with gloves and with a halo formed of his knives which were as
sharp as razors, and which he planted close to her, was his wife. She
might have been a woman of forty, and must have been fairly pretty, but
with perverse prettiness, an impudent mouth, a mouth that was at the
same time sensual and bad, with the lower lip too thick for the thin,
dry upper lip.

I had several times noticed that every time he planted a knife in the
board, she uttered a laugh, so low as scarcely to be heard, but which
was very significant when one heard it, for it was a hard and very
mocking laugh, but I had always attributed that sort of reply to an
artifice which the occasion required. It was intended, I thought, to
accentuate the danger she incurred and the contempt that she felt for
it, thanks to the sureness of the thrower's hands, and so I was very
surprised when the mountebank said to me:

"Have you observed her laugh, I say? Her evil laugh which makes fun of
me, and her cowardly laugh, which defies me? Yes, cowardly, because she
knows nothing can happen to her, nothing, in spite of all she deserves,
in spite of all that I ought to do to her, in spite of all that I want
to do to her." "What do you want to do?" "Confound it! Cannot you guess?
I want ... to kill her," "To kill her, because she has ..." "Because she
has deceived me? No, no, not that, I tell you again. I have forgiven her
for that, a long time ago, and I am too much accustomed to it! But the
worst of it is, that the first time I forgave her, when I told her that
all the same, I might some day have my revenge by cutting her throat, if
I chose, without seeming to do it on purpose, as if it were an accident,
mere awkwardness." "Oh! So you said that to her?" "Of course I did, and
I meant it. I thought I might be able to do it, for you see I had the
perfect right to do so. It was so simple, so easy, so tempting! Just
think! A mistake of less than half an inch, and her skin would be cut at
the neck where the jugular vein is, and the jugular would be severed. My
knives cut very well! And when once the jugular is cut ... good-by. The
blood would spurt out, and one,