X

She entered into the joke, and replied: “No; only a silk handkerchief tied round his head.”

George shrugged his shoulders, and observed, with contempt, “What a baby.”

From that time forward Charles became for him an object of continual conversation. He dragged him in on all possible occasions, speaking of him as “Poor Charles,” with an air of infinite pity. When he returned home from the office, where he had been accosted twice or thrice as Forestier, he avenged himself by bitter railleries against the dead man in his tomb. He recalled his defects, his absurdities, his littleness, enumerating them with enjoyment, developing and augmenting them as though he had wished to combat the influence of a dreaded rival over the heart of his wife. He would say, “I say, Made, do you remember the day when that duffer Forestier tried to prove to us that stout men were stronger than spare ones?”

Then he sought to learn a number of private and secret details respecting the departed, which his wife, ill at ease, refused to tell him. But he obstinately persisted, saying, “Come, now, tell me all about it. He must have been very comical at such a time?”

She murmured, “Oh! do leave him alone.”

But he went on, “No, but tell me now, he must have been a duffer to sleep with?” And he always wound up with, “What a donkey he was.”

One evening, towards the end of June, as he was smoking a cigarette at the window, the fineness of the evening inspired him with a wish for a drive, and he said, “Made, shall we go as far as the Bois de Boulogne?”

“Certainly.”

They took an open carriage and drove up the Champs Élysées, and then along the main avenue of the Bois de Boulogne. It was a breezeless night,