ern nail-maker
asserting itself in this crisis which moved him so deeply, he threw back
the coverlids with a brutal and contemptuous gesture, knocking down the
innumerable toys they bore, and forcing the half-clad Levantine to
bound to her feet with a promptitude amazing in so massive a person. She
roared at the outrage, drew the folds of her dalmatic against her bust,
pushed her cap sideways on her dishevelled hair, and began to abuse her
husband.

"Never, understand me, never! You may drag me sooner to this----"

The filth flowed from her heavy lips as from a spout. Jansoulet could
have imagined himself in some frightful den of the port of Marseilles,
at some quarrel of prostitutes and bullies, or again at some open-air
dispute between Genoese, Maltese, and Provencal hags, gleaning on the
quays round the sacks of wheat, and abusing each other, crouched in the
whirlwinds of golden dust. She was indeed a Levantine of a seaport,
a spoiled child, who, in the evening, left alone, had heard from her
terrace or from her gondola the sailors revile each other in every
tongue of the Latin seas, and had remembered it all. The wretched man
looked at her, frightened, terrified at what she forced him to hear, at
her grotesque figure, foaming and gasping:

"No, I will not go--no, I will not go!"

And this was the mother of his children, a daughter of the Afchins!
Suddenly, at the thought that his fate was in the hands of this woman,
that it would only cost her a dress to put on to save him--and that time
was flying--that soon it would be too late, a criminal feeling rose to
his brain and distorted his features. He came straight to her, his hands
contracted, with such a terrible expression that the daughter of the
Afchins, frightened, rushed, calling towards the door by which the
_masseur_ had just gone out:

"Aristide!"

This cry, the words, this intimacy of his wife with a servant! Jansoulet
stopped, his rage suddenly calmed; then, with a gesture of disgust, he
flung himself out, slamming the doors, more eager to fly the misfortune
and the horror whose presence he divined in his own home, than to seek
elsewhere the help he had been promised.

A quarter of an hour later he made his appearance at the Hemerlingues',
making a despairing gesture as he entered to the banker, and approached
the baroness stammering the ready-made phrase he had heard repeated so
often the night of his ball, "His wife, very unwell--most grieved not