took the train, and called on her lover’s mother, and in the highest _ancien régime_ manner, said: “Madame, I come to return your dear son to you.” His little _fugue_, she said, was at an end. The two ladies parted on the best of terms, the one to welcome back the erring sheep (not that a French mother regards her son under these circumstances as an erring sheep), and the other to open the doors of her closed _salon_ in Paris to all the notabilities she had left sighing for her brilliant and hospitable roof. What will you? When a woman is not his own wife, a Parisian does not put any price upon her honour. True, he makes up for this laxity in regard to his neighbour’s wife by arrogating to himself the right to murder his own faithless wife with impunity. By this legal ferocity he buys back the privilege of considering himself at times a model of Roman virtue. The _salon_ is all very well, so are the songs of Montmartre, the Théâtre Rosse, but there is just one little point, a solitary point, on which the Frenchman is in no mood to _blaguer_, not being Molière, and that is _his_ wife’s fidelity to the marriage vow, which vow, if we are to believe him (I confess I do not) he spends his own life in breaking. He laughs at most other things, but here he displays a desperate and unhumorous gravity. The law considerately assists him, by telling him that killing is no murder. But if he doesn’t laugh, his neighbours round him laugh joyously for him. The infidelity of another man’s wife is the best of all jokes in France, and public sympathy always goes with the wife. [Illustration: GLEANERS _J. A. Breton_]