woman who knows how to hold herself above all dagger thrusts, saying:  “You are very inquisitive; what is it to you?  Why do you wish to know?  Ah! you are jealous!  And suppose I do not choose to answer you?”—­in short, a woman who possesses the hundred and thirty-seven methods of saying No, and incommensurable variations of the word Yes.  Is not a treatise on the words yes and no, a fine diplomatic, philosophic, logographic, and moral work, still waiting to be written?  But to accomplish this work, which we may also call diabolic, isn’t an androgynous genius necessary?  For that reason, probably, it will never be attempted.  And besides, of all unpublished works isn’t it the best known and the best practised among women?  Have you studied the behavior, the pose, the disinvoltura of a falsehood?  Examine it.

Madame Desmarets was seated in the right-hand corner of her carriage, her husband in the left.  Having forced herself to recover from her emotion in the ballroom, she now affected a calm demeanor.  Her husband had then said nothing to her, and he still said nothing.  Jules looked out of the carriage window at the black walls of the silent houses before which they passed; but suddenly, as if driven by a determining thought, when turning the corner of a street he examined his wife, who appeared to be cold in spite of the fur-lined pelisse in which she was wrapped.  He thought she seemed pensive, and perhaps she really was so.  Of all communicable things, reflection and gravity are the most contagious.

“What could Monsieur de Maulincour have said to affect you so keenly?” said Jules; “and why does he wish me to go to his house and find out?”

“He can tell you nothing in his house that I cannot tell you here,” she replied.

Then, with that feminine craft which always slightly degrades virtue, Madame Jules waited for another question.  Her husband turned his face back to the houses, and continued his study of their walls.  Another question would imply suspicion, distrust.  To suspect a woman is a crime in love.  Jules had already killed a man for doubting his wife.  Clemence did not know all there was of true passion, of loyal reflection, in her husband’s silence; just as Jules was ignorant of the generous drama that was wringing the heart of his Clemence.

The carriage rolled on through a silent Paris, bearing the couple, —­two lovers who adored each other, and who, gently leaning on the same silken cushion, were being parted by an abyss.  In these elegant coupes returning from a ball between midnight and two in the morning, how many curious and singular scenes must pass,—­meaning those coupes with lanterns, which light both the street and the carriage, those with their windows unshaded; in short, legitimate coupes, in which couples can quarrel without caring for the eyes of pedestrians, because the civil code gives a right to provoke, or beat, or kiss, a wife in a carriage or elsewhere, anywhere, everywhere!  How many secrets must be revealed in this way to nocturnal pedestrians,—­to those young fellows who have gone to a ball in a carriage, but are obliged, for whatever cause it may be, to return on foot.  It was the first time that Jules and Clemence had been together thus,—­each in a corner; usually the husband pressed close to his wife.