‘Well, my dear Magnan, here’s the fact in two words,’ he said in a moved voice, ‘Pelletier is making advances to my wife.’

The doctor pushed out his lower lip to hide a smile, and nodded his head several times with affected seriousness.

‘Think of that!’ he said then, ‘I wouldn’t have beheved that that lump of a Pelletier would have had such good taste. But are you quite sure of what you are saying? Usually husbands are the last to know about matters like that.’

‘I am only too sure: you’ll see how. My wife went to spend some days at her mother’s at Fontainebleau. The day before yesterday, poking about by chance in my bedroom, I noticed that the key of my desk fitted her wardrobe as well. Mechanically I opened that bit of furniture, and in a rather mysterious back drawer, I found several letters from Pelletier.’

‘By Jove! But all the same, why open a bit of furniture belonging to your wife?’

‘I was within my rights: besides, suspend your judgment. Because of the very tenor of those letters, I got proof of Virginia’s complete innocence; she had nothing more to reproach herself with than having kept this correspondence a mystery from me. She had never encouraged him, I am practically sure of it. So I am much less annoyed with her than with Pelletier: but as to him, I feel that I will never pardon him. A man I opened my house to! an old comrade of Sainte-Barbe! a friend, in fact; at least I thought him one!’

‘Are you forgetting that a man is betrayed only by his friends?’

‘Yesterday I went to see him.’

‘Ah!’

‘I reproached him with his unworthy conduct; do you know what he answered?’

‘He denied it.’

‘At first. But at the sight of his letters, he realized that all denials would be useless. “My dear Bouchereau,” he said to me then, with that impertinent air of his which you know, “since you are so well informed, I won’t take the trouble to tell lies about it. It is quite true that I am in love with your wife; I have already told her so, and I do not promise not to say it to her again, because, in all probability, I would not keep my oath. I understand perfectly that this proceeding displeases you and hurts you; but you are not ignorant that I am a man of honour, and that I am in the habit of taking the responsibility for my acts and deeds. If, then, you are insulted, I am at your service, ready to give you satisfaction, where, when, and as you please.”

‘That’s cheek for you!’ said the doctor, forcing himself to keep serious. ‘What! he dared to say that to you?’

‘In so many words.’

‘And what did you answer?’

‘That he’d hear from me soon. And then I came away, for it was beneath my dignity to go on any further with a conversation like that. That’s how things stand.’

The doctor’s face took on a grave expression. He took a turn up the room, his head down and his hands behind his back; then, approaching his visitor again: