me, monsieur, where we are? My fool of a husband made us
lose our way, although he pretended he knew the country perfectly."

I replied confidently:

"Madame, you are going towards Saint-Cloud and turning your back on
Versailles."

With a look of annoyed pity for her husband, she exclaimed:

"What, we are turning our back on Versailles? Why, that is just where we
want to dine!"

"I am going there also, madame."

"Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, mon Dieu!" she repeated, shrugging her shoulders,
and in that tone of sovereign contempt assumed by women to express their
exasperation.

She was quite young, pretty, a brunette with a slight shadow on her upper
lip.

As for him, he was perspiring and wiping his forehead. It was assuredly a
little Parisian bourgeois couple. The man seemed cast down, exhausted and
distressed.

"But, my dear friend, it was you--" he murmured.

She did not allow him to finish his sentence.

"It was I! Ah, it is my fault now! Was it I who wanted to go out without
getting any information, pretending that I knew how to find my way? Was
it I who wanted to take the road to the right on top of the hill,
insisting that I recognized the road? Was it I who undertook to take
charge of Cachou--"

She had not finished speaking when her husband, as if he had suddenly
gone crazy, gave a piercing scream, a long, wild cry that could not be
described in any language, but which sounded like 'tuituit'.

The young woman did not appear to be surprised or moved and resumed:

"No, really, some people are so stupid and they pretend they know
everything. Was it I who took the train to Dieppe last year instead of
the train to Havre--tell me, was it I? Was it I who bet that M.
Letourneur lived in Rue des Martyres? Was it I who would not believe that
Celeste was a thief?"

She went on, furious, with a surprising flow of language, accumulating
the most varied, the most unexpected and the most overwhelming
accusations drawn from the intimate relations of their daily life,
reproaching her husband for all his actions, all his ideas, all his
habits, all his enterprises, all his efforts, for his life from the time
of their marriage up to the present time.

He strove to check her, to calm her and stammered:

"But, my dear, it is useless--before monsieur. We are making
ourselves ridiculous. This does not interest monsieur."

And he cast mournful glances into the thicket as though he sought to
sound its peaceful and mysteri