Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images available at The Internet Archive) [Illustration] A RECONCILIATION _We had drawn near to each other, having both left the table to go to the window. I do not know how it happened, but I soon found Eugénie in my arms; then we kissed, we walked away from the window, and----_ NOVELS BY Paul de Kock VOLUME XVIII LE COCU PRINTED BY ARRANGEMENT WITH [Illustration] GEORGE BARRIE’S SONS THE JEFFERSON PRESS BOSTON NEW YORK _Copyrighted, 1903-1904, by G. B. & Sons._ PREFACE BECAUSE OF THE TITLE I have never written prefaces to my novels; I have always considered what an author says in a preface, what he therein explains beforehand to the reader, as utterly useless. The reader would be entitled to reply, as Alceste replies to Orontes: “We shall see.” Nor have I ever supposed that the public read a novel in order to talk with its author. It matters little to my readers, I presume, whether I am young or old, short or tall, whether I write in the morning or at night; what they want is a work that pleases them, in which there is enough of truth to enable them to identify themselves with the characters; and if the author constantly talks of himself and stations himself between his heroes and his reader, it seems to me that he destroys the illusion and injures his own work. My reason for placing a preface at the head of this book has to do with the title--that title which has caused persons to recoil in dismay who do not balk at _executioners_, _damned_, _tortured_, _guillotined_, and other pleasant conceits in which authors indulge without objection. I propose, not to justify myself, for I do not think myself guilty, but to reassure some of my readers of the gentler sex, whom my title might alarm beyond measure. _Le Cocu!_ What is there so indecent in the word, pray? In the first place, what does it mean? A married man who is deceived by his wife, a husband whose wife is unfaithful. Would you like me to give my book such a title as _The Husband whose Wife was False to Her Vows_? That would resemble a Pontoise poster. Was it not clearer and simpler to take the one word which, alone, means all that? You might have called it the _Predestined_, someone may say. My answer to that is that that title would have been excellent for those who understood it, but that very many people would never have guessed that it meant cuckold; that everybody is not familiar with such conventional language, and that I write to be understood by everybody.