that she would never have another dog;
but one bitter cold evening a poor lean greyhound was found whining at
the castle-gate, and she took him in and forbade the maids to speak of
him to her husband. She hid him in a room that no one went to, smuggled
food to him from her own plate, made him a warm bed to lie on and petted
him like a child.

Yves de Cornault came home, and the next day she found the greyhound
strangled on her pillow. She wept in secret, but said nothing, and
resolved that even if she met a dog dying of hunger she would never
bring him into the castle; but one day she found a young sheep-dog, a
brindled puppy with good blue eyes, lying with a broken leg in the snow
of the park. Yves de Cornault was at Rennes, and she brought the dog
in, warmed and fed it, tied up its leg and hid it in the castle till
her husband's return. The day before, she gave it to a peasant woman
who lived a long way off, and paid her handsomely to care for it and say
nothing; but that night she heard a whining and scratching at her door,
and when she opened it the lame puppy, drenched and shivering, jumped up
on her with little sobbing barks. She hid him in her bed, and the next
morning was about to have him taken back to the peasant woman when she
heard her husband ride into the court. She shut the dog in a chest and
went down to receive him. An hour or two later, when she returned to her
room, the puppy lay strangled on her pillow...

After that she dared not make a pet of any other dog; and her loneliness
became almost unendurable. Sometimes, when she crossed the court of
the castle, and thought no one was looking, she stopped to pat the old
pointer at the gate. But one day as she was caressing him her husband
came out of the chapel; and the next day the old dog was gone...

This curious narrative was not told in one sitting of the court, or
received without impatience and incredulous comment. It was plain that
the Judges were surprised by its puerility, and that it did not help the
accused in the eyes of the public. It was an odd tale, certainly; but
what did it prove? That Yves de Cornault disliked dogs, and that his
wife, to gratify her own fancy, persistently ignored this dislike.
As for pleading this trivial disagreement as an excuse for her
relations--whatever their nature--with her supposed accomplice, the
argument was so absurd that her own lawyer manifestly regretted having
let her make use of it, and tried several