daughter, and let's have no more of this.' I remember it
distinctly, because, when I heard the old fellow call my love such a
name, I flew into a great passion, and almost wanted to kill him. Ah,
one never gains anything by marrying in opposition to one's parents!"

The worthy fellow was lost in the midst of his recollections. He was
very far from his story. The investigating magistrate attempted to bring
him back into the right path, "Come to the point," he said.

"I am going to, sir; but it was necessary to begin at the beginning.
I married. The evening after the wedding, and when the relatives and
guests had departed, I was about to join my wife, when I perceived my
father all alone in a corner weeping. The sight touched my heart, and
I had a foreboding of evil; but it quickly passed away. It is so
delightful during the first six months one passes with a dearly loved
wife! One seems to be surrounded by mists that change the very rocks
into palaces and temples so completely that novices are taken in. For
two years, in spite of a few little quarrels, everything went on nicely.
Claudine managed me like a child. Ah, she was cunning! She might have
seized and bound me, and carried me to market and sold me, without my
noticing it. Her great fault was her love of finery. All that I earned,
and my business was very prosperous, she put on her back. Every week
there was something new, dresses, jewels, bonnets, the devil's baubles,
which the dealers invent for the perdition of the female sex. The
neighbors chattered, but I thought it was all right. At the baptism
of our son, who was called Jacques after my father, to please her, I
squandered all I had economized during my youth, more than three hundred
pistoles, with which I had intended purchasing a meadow that lay in the
midst of our property."

M. Daburon was boiling over with impatience, but he could do nothing.

"Go on, go on," he said every time Lerouge seemed inclined to stop.

"I was well enough pleased," continued the sailor, "until one morning
I saw one of the Count de Commarin's servants entering our house; the
count's chateau is only about a mile from where I lived on the other
side of the town. It was a fellow named Germain whom I didn't like at
all. It was said about the country that he had been mixed up in the
seduction of poor Thomassine, a fine young girl who lived near us; she
appears to have pleased the count, and one day suddenly disappeared. I
asked my