ugal police.

Hector is an old schoolmate, who has married in the Loire Inferieure.

Adolphe lifts up the cloth of his writing desk, a cloth the border of
which has been embroidered by Caroline, the ground being blue, black
or red velvet,--the color, as you see, is perfectly immaterial,--and
he slips his unfinished letters to Madame de Fischtaminel, to his
friend Hector, between the table and the cloth.

The thickness of a sheet of paper is almost nothing, velvet is a
downy, discreet material, but, no matter, these precautions are in
vain. The male devil is fairly matched by the female devil: Tophet
will furnish them of all genders. Caroline has Mephistopheles on her
side, the demon who causes tables to spurt forth fire, and who, with
his ironic finger points out the hiding place of keys--the secret of
secrets.

Caroline has noticed the thickness of a letter sheet between this
velvet and this table: she hits upon a letter to Hector instead of
hitting upon one to Madame de Fischtaminel, who has gone to Plombieres
Springs, and reads the following:

"My dear Hector:

"I pity you, but you have acted wisely in entrusting me with a
knowledge of the difficulties in which you have voluntarily involved
yourself. You never would see the difference between the country woman
and the woman of Paris. In the country, my dear boy, you are always
face to face with your wife, and, owing to the ennui which impels you,
you rush headforemost into the enjoyment of your bliss. This is a
great error: happiness is an abyss, and when you have once reached the
bottom, you never get back again, in wedlock.

"I will show you why. Let me take, for your wife's sake, the shortest
path--the parable.

"I remember having made a journey from Paris to Ville-Parisis, in that
vehicle called a 'bus: distance, twenty miles: 'bus, lumbering: horse,
lame. Nothing amuses me more than to draw from people, by the aid of
that gimlet called the interrogation, and to obtain, by means of an
attentive air, the sum of information, anecdotes and learning that
everybody is anxious to part with: and all men have such a sum, the
peasant as well as the banker, the corporal as well as the marshal of
France.

"I have often noticed how ready these casks, overflowing with wit, are
to open their sluices while being transported by diligence or 'bus, or
by any vehicle drawn by horses, for nobody talks in a railway car.

"At the rate of our exit from Paris, the journey