“In truth, madame,” he says with acrimony as he enters his wife’s room, where she is finishing her toilette, “you seem to have lost your habitual tact.  This is a nice time to be giving dinner parties!  Twenty persons will soon learn—­”

“That you are director-general!” she cries, showing him a royal despatch.

He is thunderstruck.  He takes the letter, he turns it now one way, now another; he opens it.  He sits down and spreads it out.

“I well know,” he says, “that justice would be rendered me under whatever ministers I served.”

“Yes, my dear!  But M. Villeplaine has answered for you with his life,
and his eminence the Cardinal de ----- of whom he is the--”

“M. de Villeplaine?”

This is such a munificent recompense, that the husband adds with the smile of a director-general: 

“Why, deuce take it, my dear, this is your doing!”

“Ah! don’t thank me for it; Adolphe did it from personal attachment to you.”

On a certain evening a poor husband was kept at home by a pouring rain, or tired, perhaps, of going to spend his evening in play, at the cafe, or in the world, and sick of all this he felt himself carried away by an impulse to follow his wife to the conjugal chamber.  There he sank into an arm-chair and like any sultan awaited his coffee, as if he would say: 

“Well, after all, she is my wife!”

The fair siren herself prepares the favorite draught; she strains it with special care, sweetens it, tastes it, and hands it to him; then, with a smile, she ventures like a submissive odalisque to make a joke, with a view to smoothing the wrinkles on the brow of her lord and master.  Up to that moment he had thought his wife stupid; but on hearing a sally as witty as that which even you would cajole with, madame, he raises his head in the way peculiar to dogs who are hunting the hare.

“Where the devil did she get that—­but it’s a random shot!” he says to himself.

From the pinnacle of his own greatness he makes a piquant repartee.  Madame retorts, the conversation becomes as lively as it is interesting, and this husband, a very superior man, is quite astonished to discover the wit of his wife, in other respects, an accomplished woman; the right word occurs to her with wonderful readiness; her tact and keenness enable her to meet an innuendo with charming originality.  She is no longer the same woman.  She notices the effect she produces upon her husband, and both to avenge herself for his neglect and to win his admiration for the lover from whom she has received, so to speak, the treasures of her intellect, she exerts herself, and becomes actually dazzling.  The husband, better able than any one else to appreciate a species of compensation which may have some influence on his future, is led to think that the passions of women are really necessary to their mental culture.

But how shall we treat those compensations which are most pleasing to husbands?