hen he practiced
under the direction of Saint-Potin, ornamented with a pink ribbon. All
had been arranged on the same shelf according to size, and a card like
those in museums bore the inscription: "The Forestier-Du Roy (late
Forestier and Co.) Collection." He quietly closed the cupboard, saying,
in tones loud enough to be heard: "There are fools and envious people
everywhere."

But he was wounded in his pride, wounded in his vanity, that touchy
pride and vanity of the writer, which produce the nervous susceptibility
ever on the alert, equally in the reporter and the genial poet. The word
"Forestier" made his ears tingle. He dreaded to hear it, and felt
himself redden when he did so. This name was to him a biting jest, more
than a jest, almost an insult. It said to him: "It is your wife who does
your work, as she did that of the other. You would be nothing without
her."

He admitted that Forestier would have been no one without Madeleine; but
as to himself, come now!

Then, at home, the haunting impression continued. It was the whole place
now that recalled the dead man to him, the whole of the furniture, the
whole of the knicknacks, everything he laid hands on. He had scarcely
thought of this at the outset, but the joke devised by his comrades had
caused a kind of mental wound, which a number of trifles, unnoticed up
to the present, now served to envenom. He could not take up anything
without at once fancying he saw the hand of Charles upon it. He only
looked at it and made use of things the latter had made use of formerly;
things that he had purchased, liked, and enjoyed. And George began even
to grow irritated at the thought of the bygone relations between his
friend and his wife. He was sometimes astonished at this revolt of his
heart, which he did not understand, and said to himself, "How the deuce
is it? I am not jealous of Madeleine's friends. I am never uneasy about
what she is up to. She goes in and out as she chooses, and yet the
recollection of that brute of a Charles puts me in a rage." He added,
"At the bottom, he was only an idiot, and it is that, no doubt, that
wounds me. I am vexed that Madeleine could have married such a fool."
And he kept continually repeating, "How is it that she could have
stomached such a donkey for a single moment?"

His rancor was daily increased by a thousand insignificant details,
which stung him like pin pricks, by the incessant reminders of the other
arising out of a wo