She listened attentively for a long time and then she cursed the monotonous noise of the grasshopper and the song of the birds. "Had it not been for that importunate noise, a cry of joy starting from the big rocks could have arrived here." Her greedy eye devoured that immense slope of dark verdure which was as level as a meadow. "Why isn't he clever enough," she said to herself, quite overcome, "to invent some signal to tell me that his happiness is equal to mine?" She only came down from the dovecot when she was frightened of her husband coming there to look for her. She found him furious. He was perusing the soothing phrases of M. de Valenod and reading them with an emotion to which they were but little used. "I always come back to the same idea," said Madame de Rênal seizing a moment when a pause in her husband's ejaculations gave her the possibility of getting heard. "It is necessary for Julien to travel. Whatever talent he may have for Latin, he is only a peasant after all, often coarse and lacking in tact. Thinking to be polite, he addresses inflated compliments to me every day, which are in bad taste. He learns them by heart out of some novel or other." "He never reads one," exclaimed M. de Rênal. "I am assured of it. Do you think that I am the master of a house who is so blind as to be ignorant of what takes place in his own home." "Well, if he doesn't read these droll compliments anywhere, he invents them, and that's all the worse so far as he is concerned. He must have talked about me in this tone in Verrières and perhaps without going so far," said Madame Rênal with the idea of making a discovery, "he may have talked in the same strain to Elisa, which is almost the same as if he had said it to M. Valenod." "Ah," exclaimed M. de Rênal, shaking the table and the room with one of the most violent raps ever made by a human fist. "The anonymous printed letter and Valenod's letters are written on the same paper." "At last," thought Madame de Rênal. She pretended to be overwhelmed at this discovery, and without having the courage to add a single word, went and sat down some way off on the divan at the bottom of the drawing-room. From this point the battle was won. She had a great deal of trouble in preventing M. de Rênal from going to speak to the supposed author of the anonymous letter. "What, can't you see that making a scene with M. Valenod without sufficient proof would be the most signal mistake? You are envied, Monsieur, and who is responsible? Your talents: your wise management, your tasteful buildings, the dowry which I have brought you, and above all, the substantial legacy which we are entitled to hope for from my good aunt, a legacy, the importance of which is inordinately exaggerated, have made you into the first person in Verrières." "You are forgetting my birth," said M. de Rênal, smiling a little.