This being a day when friendly or, at any rate, courteous visits are customary, he had put on a shabby knitted scarf, the bluish wool of which showed under his overcoat decorated with torn buttonholes: this he did to show his scorn of the human race. He had also donned a broken straw hat that his good wife, Marguerite, used to stick on a cherry tree in the garden when the cherries were ripe. He cast a pitying glance at M. Bergeret’s white tie. “You have just bowed,” said he, “to a pretty hussy.” It pained M. Bergeret to have to listen to such harsh and unphilosophic language. But as he could forgive a good deal to a nature warped by misanthropy, it was with gentleness that he set about reproving M. Mazure for the coarseness of his speech. “My dear Mazure,” said he, “I expected from your wide experience a juster estimate of a lady who harms no one.” M. Mazure answered drily that he objected to light women. From him it was by no means a sincere expression of opinion, for, strictly speaking, M. Mazure had no moral code. But he persisted in his bad temper. “Come now,” said M. Bergeret with a smile, “I’ll tell you what is wrong with Madame de Gromance. She was born just a hundred and fifty years too late. In eighteenth-century society no man of brains would have disapproved of her.” M. Mazure began to relent under this flattery. He was no sullen Puritan, but he respected the civil marriage, to which the statesmen of the Revolution had imparted fresh dignity. For all that, he did not deny the claim of the heart and the senses. He acknowledged that the mistress has her place in society as well as the wife. “And, by the way, how is Madame Bergeret?” he inquired. As the north wind whistled across the Place Saint-Exupère M. Bergeret watched M. Mazure’s nose getting redder and redder under the turned-down brim of the straw hat. His own feet and knees were frozen, and he suffered his thoughts to play round the idea of Madame de Gromance just to get a little warmth and joy into his veins. Paillot’s shop was not open, and the two professors, thus fireless and houseless, stood looking at each other in sad sympathy. In the depths of his friendly heart M. Bergeret thought to himself: “As soon as I leave this fellow with his limited, boorish ideas, I shall be once more alone in the desert waste of this hateful town. It will be wretched.” And his feet remained glued to the sharp stones of the square, whilst the wind made his ears burn. “I will walk back with you as far as your door,” said the archivist of the department. Then they walked on side by side, bowing from time to time to fellow-citizens who hurried along in their Sunday clothes, carrying dolls and bags of sweets.