d him so roughly that he fell against a
piece of furniture, and when she saw the lump on his forehead she burst
into involuntary laughter. After that her experiments on La Faloise
having whetted her appetite, she treated him like an animal, threshing
him and chasing him to an accompaniment of kicks.

"Gee up! Gee up! You're a horse. Hoi! Gee up! Won't you hurry up, you
dirty screw?"

At other times he was a dog. She would throw her scented handkerchief
to the far end of the room, and he had to run and pick it up with his
teeth, dragging himself along on hands and knees.

"Fetch it, Caesar! Look here, I'll give you what for if you don't look
sharp! Well done, Caesar! Good dog! Nice old fellow! Now behave pretty!"

And he loved his abasement and delighted in being a brute beast. He
longed to sink still further and would cry:

"Hit harder. On, on! I'm wild! Hit away!"

She was seized with a whim and insisted on his coming to her one night
clad in his magnificent chamberlain's costume. Then how she did laugh
and make fun of him when she had him there in all his glory, with the
sword and the cocked hat and the white breeches and the full-bottomed
coat of red cloth laced with gold and the symbolic key hanging on its
left-hand skirt. This key made her especially merry and urged her to a
wildly fanciful and extremely filthy discussion of it. Laughing without
cease and carried away by her irreverence for pomp and by the joy of
debasing him in the official dignity of his costume, she shook him,
pinched him, shouted, "Oh, get along with ye, Chamberlain!" and ended by
an accompaniment of swinging kicks behind. Oh, those kicks! How heartily
she rained them on the Tuileries and the majesty of the imperial court,
throning on high above an abject and trembling people. That's what
she thought of society! That was her revenge! It was an affair of
unconscious hereditary spite; it had come to her in her blood. Then when
once the chamberlain was undressed and his coat lay spread on the ground
she shrieked, "Jump!" And he jumped. She shrieked, "Spit!" And he spat.
With a shriek she bade him walk on the gold, on the eagles, on the
decorations, and he walked on them. Hi tiddly hi ti! Nothing was left;
everything was going to pieces. She smashed a chamberlain just as she
smashed a flask or a comfit box, and she made filth of him, reduced him
to a heap of mud at a street corner.

Meanwhile the goldsmiths had failed to keep their promise,