ur palate have a soul; you taste the delights of a
genuine feast, etc.; and during this ecstasy a feeling of remorse seizes
upon you, and you go to your wife's room.

"Really, my dear girl, we have not means which warrant our buying
_pates_."

"But it costs us nothing!"

"Oh! ho!"

"Yes, it is M. Achille's brother who sent it to him."

You catch sight of M. Achille in a corner. The celibate greets you, he
is radiant on seeing that you have accepted the _pate_. You look at
your wife, who blushes; you stroke your beard a few times; and, as
you express no thanks, the two lovers divine your acceptance of the
compensation.

A sudden change in the ministry takes place. A husband, who is
Councillor of State, trembles for fear of being wiped from the roll,
when the night before he had been made director-general; all the
ministers are opposed to him and he has turned Constitutionalist.
Foreseeing his disgrace he has betaken himself to Auteuil, in search of
consolation from an old friend who quotes Horace and Tibullus to him.
On returning home he sees the table laid as if to receive the most
influential men of the assembly.

"In truth, madame," he says with acrimony as he enters his wife's
room, where she is finishing her toilette, "you seem to have lost your
habitual tact. This is a nice time to be giving dinner parties! Twenty
persons will soon learn--"

"That you are director-general!" she cries, showing him a royal
despatch.

He is thunderstruck. He takes the letter, he turns it now one way, now
another; he opens it. He sits down and spreads it out.

"I well know," he says, "that justice would be rendered me under
whatever ministers I served."

"Yes, my dear! But M. Villeplaine has answered for you with his life,
and his eminence the Cardinal de ----- of whom he is the--"

"M. de Villeplaine?"

This is such a munificent recompense, that the husband adds with the
smile of a director-general:

"Why, deuce take it, my dear, this is your doing!"

"Ah! don't thank me for it; Adolphe did it from personal attachment to
you."

On a certain evening a poor husband was kept at home by a pouring rain,
or tired, perhaps, of going to spend his evening in play, at the cafe,
or in the world, and sick of all this he felt himself carried away by an
impulse to follow his wife to the conjugal chamber. There he sank into
an arm-chair and like any sultan awaited his coffee, as if he would say:

"Well, after all, she is my w