rightened me, you naughty boy; I have been the whole
night sleepless.'

"I did not answer, but began to weep. My father did not utter a single
word.

"Eight days later I entered the Lycee.

"Well, my friend, it was all over with me. I had witnessed the other
side of things, the bad side; I have not been able to perceive the good
side since that day. What things have passed in my mind, what strange
phenomena have warped my ideas, I do not know. But I no longer have a
taste for anything, a wish for anything, a love for anybody, a desire
for anything whatever, no ambition, no hope. And I can always see my
poor mother lying on the ground, in the avenue, while my father was
maltreating her. My mother died a few years after; my father lives
still. I have not seen him since. Waiter, a 'bock.'"

A waiter brought him his "bock," which he swallowed at a gulp. But, in
taking up his pipe again, trembling as he was, he broke it. Then he
made a violent gesture:

"Zounds! This is indeed a grief, a real grief. I have had it for a
month, and it was coloring so beautifully!"

Then he went off through the vast saloon, which was now full of smoke
and of people drinking, calling out:

"Waiter, a 'bock'--and a new pipe."

SEQUEL TO A DIVORCE

Certainly, although he had been engaged in the most extraordinary, most
unlikely, most extravagant, and funniest cases, and had won legal games
without a trump in his hand--although he had worked out the obscure law
of divorce, as if it had been a Californian gold mine, Maitre[1]
Garrulier, the celebrated, the only Garrulier, could not check a
movement of surprise, nor a disheartening shake of the head, nor a
smile, when the Countess de Baudemont explained her affairs to him for
the first time.

He had just opened his correspondence, and his slender hands, on which
he bestowed the greatest attention, buried themselves in a heap of
female letters, and one might have thought oneself in the confessional
of a fashionable preacher, so impregnated was the atmosphere with
delicate perfumes.

Immediately--even before she had said a word--with the sharp glance of
a practised man of the world, that look which made beautiful Madame de
Serpenoise say: "He strips your heart bare!" the lawyer had classed her
in the third category. Those who suffer came into his first category,
those who love, into the second, and those who are bored, into the
third--and she belonged to the latter.

She was a pret