dining-room while he himself was placidly sorting the slips for his _Virgilius nauticus_, unmoved by either love or hate. Every evening Madame Bergeret was sorely tempted to follow her husband into the study that had now become his bedroom as well, and the impregnable fastness of his impregnable will. She longed either to ask his forgiveness, or to overwhelm him with the lowest abuse, to prick his face with the point of a kitchen-knife or to slash herself in the breast—one or the other, indifferently, for all she wanted was to attract his notice to herself, just to exist for him. And this thing which was denied her, she needed with the same overpowering need with which one craves bread, water, air, salt. She still despised M. Bergeret, for this feeling was hereditary and filial in her nature. It came to her from her father and flowed in her blood. She would no longer have been a Pouilly, the niece of Pouilly of the Dictionary, if she had acknowledged any kind of equality between herself and her husband. She despised him because she was a Pouilly and he was a Bergeret, and not because she had deceived him. She had the good sense not to plume herself too much on this superiority, but it is more than probable that she despised him for not having killed M. Roux. Her scorn was a fixed quantity, capable neither of increase nor decrease. Nevertheless, she felt no hatred for him, although until lately, she had rather enjoyed tormenting and annoying him in the ordinary affairs of every day, by scolding him for the untidiness of his clothes and the tactlessness of his behaviour, or by telling him interminable anecdotes about the neighbours, trivial and silly stories in which even the malice and ill-nature were but commonplace. For this windbag of a mind produced neither bitter venom nor strange poison and was but puffed up by the breath of vanity.