humiliated and alone, childless, husbandless, homeless, penniless. One last effort she made to resume her rightful position in the house. It was on the morning after the most miserable and wretched day that she had ever spent. After having endured the insolent demands of Mademoiselle Rose, the modiste, and of Lafolie, the butcher, after having caught Marie stealing the three francs seventy-five centimes left by the laundress on the dining-room sideboard, Madame Bergeret went to bed so full of misery and fear that she could not sleep. Her overwhelming troubles brought on an attack of romantic fancy, and in the shades of night she saw a vision of Marie pouring out a poisonous potion that M. Bergeret had prepared for her. With the dawn her fevered terrors fled, and having dressed carefully, she entered M. Bergeret’s study with an air of quiet gravity. So little had he expected her that she found the door open. “Lucien! Lucien!” said she. She called upon the innocent names of their three daughters. She begged and implored, while she gave a fair enough description of the wretched state of the house. She promised that for the future she would be good, faithful, economical and good-tempered. But M. Bergeret would not answer. Kneeling at his feet, she sobbed and twisted the arms that had once been so imperious in their gestures. He deigned neither to see nor to hear her. She showed him the spectacle of a Pouilly at his feet. But he only took up his hat and went out. Then she got up and ran after him, and with outstretched fist and lips drawn back shouted after him from the hall: “I never loved you. Do you hear that? Never, not even when I first married you! You are hideous, you are ridiculous and everything else that’s horrid. And everyone in the town knows that you are nothing but a ninnyhammer ... yes, a ninnyhammer....” She had never heard this word save on the lips of Pouilly of the Dictionary, who had been in his grave for more than twenty years, and now it recurred to her mind suddenly, as though by a miracle. She attached no definite meaning to it, but as it sounded excessively insulting, she shouted down the staircase after him, “Ninnyhammer, ninnyhammer!” It was her last effort as a wife. A fortnight after this interview Madame Bergeret appeared before her husband and said, this time in quiet, resolute tones, “I cannot remain here any longer. It is your doing entirely. I am going to my mother’s; you must send me Marianne and Juliette. Pauline I will let you have....” Pauline was the eldest; she was like her father, and between them there existed a certain sympathy. “I hope,” added Madame Bergeret, “that you will make a suitable allowance for your two daughters who will live with me. For myself I ask nothing.”