“Oh, yes!” he replied quickly and in good faith. I should have made the same answer to this creature whose accent alone was sufficient to irritate me. I then began an enthusiastic eulogy of the poor girl I hardly knew, and who had surprised me by her sudden vulgarity. Jacques listened to me as I sang the praises of his mistress in a stupor which Madam de Bonnivet construed into a sense of umbrage. She was not the woman to neglect this opportunity of sowing the seeds of discord between two friends. It is my test for all feminine or masculine natures, this instinctive tremor of sympathy or antipathy before the sentiments of others. It was sufficient for Madam de Bonnivet to believe that Jacques and I were united by sincere comradeship, for the temptation to sever this friendship to seize her. “Stop,” she said; “should the painter be so amorous of his model?” She laughed her wicked laugh. Then suddenly she turned her head and said to her husband: “Pierre, you don’t take enough exercise, you are getting fat. It makes you look ten years older than you really are. You should take Senneterre as your example.” This evening the “beater” was polished and fastened together like an old piece of furniture, so that this praise of his apparent youth was fearful irony. “Come,” she concluded, “don’t get angry, but have some raisins, they are exquisite.” “What an amiable child!” I said to myself as she offered us the box of fruit in a peevish way. “What time is she put to bed?” Her character, which had no inner truth, was ceaselessly dominated by a double need in which two moral miseries were manifest: the unhealthy appetite for producing an effect developed in her by the abuse of worldly success, the even more unhealthy appetite for emotion at all costs, the result of secret licentiousness, which had made her _blasé_, and her lack of heart. Have I mentioned that she was a mother, and that she did not love her child, who had been at a boarding school for years? She could not dispense with astonishment, and she had that strange taste for fear, that singular pleasure of provoking man’s anger, that joy of feeling that she was threatened with brutality which is the great sign of woman in her natural state. Except on serious occasions the most childish things were good enough to procure for her these two emotions: such as dazzling a poor devil of a painter by ways so contrary to her social pretensions, and lighting in her husband’s eyes, without any cause, the light of anger which I had just seen there.