I
A pleasant couple the Bondels, though a little bellicose. They often quarrelled, from trivial causes, and then were reconciled. A retired tradesman who had given up business after amassing enough to live on in accordance with his simple tastes, Bondel had rented a little cottage at Saint Germain, and settled down there with his wife.
He was a placid-natured man, whose firmly rooted ideas reorientated themselves with difficulty. He had some education, read the more serious papers and had, however, an understanding of the finer shades of Gallic culture. Gifted with reason, logic, and the practical good sense that is the supreme quality of the hardworking French bourgeois, his thoughts were few but sure, and he made resolutions only on grounds that his instinct assured him to be infallible.
He was a man of middle height, and distinguished appearance, and he was going a little grey.
His wife, endowed with real qualities, had also some faults. Of a passionate nature, with a frankness of bearing that bordered on the violent, and obstinate to a degree, she cherished undying resentments against people. Once a pretty woman, she had become too plump and too highly coloured, but she passed even now, in their circle at Saint Germain, for a very lovely woman, though too miraculously healthy for genteel taste.
Their disputes almost always began at lunch, in the course of some quite unimportant discussion, and then they remained estranged until the evening, often until the next day. Their life, simple and limited as it was, lent a gravity to their lightest concerns, and every subject of conversation became a subject of dispute. It had not been so in other days, when they had a business that absorbed them, joined them in mutual anxieties, gripped their hearts, confined and imprisoned them both in bonds of partnership and a common interest.
But at Saint Germain they saw fewer people. It had been necessary to make new friends, to build for themselves, in a society of strangers, a life at once new and totally empty of occupation. Then, too, the monotony of hours that were all alike had made them a little bitter against each other, and the peaceful happiness for which they had hoped and which they had expected leisure to bring them, did not materialise.
They had just sat down to table one morning in the month of June, when Bondel asked:
“Do you know the people who live in the little red cottage at the end of the Rue de Berceau?”
Mme. Bondel must have got out of bed on the wrong side. She replied:
“Yes and no. I know them by sight, but I don’t care to know them.”
“But why? They look very pleasant.”
“Because …”
“I met the husband this morning on the terrace and we took a couple of turns together.”
Realising that there was danger in the air, Bondel added:
“It was he who accosted me and spoke first.”
His wife regarded him with displeasure. She replied:
“You could easily have avoided him.”
“But why?”
“Because people are talking about them.”
“Talking! Good heavens, people are always talking.”
M. Bondel made the mistake of becoming quite emphatic:
“My dearest, you know that I have a horror of talk. The fact that they are being talked about is enough to make me take a liking to people. As for these people, I find them very pleasant, myself.”
She demanded furiously:
“The wife too, I suppose?”
“God, yes, the wife too, although I’ve hardly seen her.”
And the discussion continued, becoming slowly more and more venomous and implacably fastened on one subject from sheer lack of other interests.
Mme. Bondel obstinately refused to say what sort of talk was going the rounds about these neighbours, leaving it to be understood that quite dreadful things, which she did not specify, were being said. Bondel shrugged his shoulders, sneered, exasperated his wife. She ended by shouting:
“Well, your gentleman is a cuckold, that’s what!”
Her husband answered unemotionally:
“I don’t see in what way that affects a man’s good name.”
She seemed stupefied.
“What, you don’t see it? … you don’t see it? … upon my word, that’s too much … you don’t see it? But it’s a public scandal: he’s hurt by the mere fact of being a cuckold!”
He answered:
“Not at all. Is a man hurt because he’s deceived, hurt because he’s betrayed, hurt because he’s robbed? … Not at all. I agree with you as far as his wife is concerned, but as for him …”
She became furious.
“He’s as much in it as she. They’re ruined, it’s a public disgrace.”
Bondel, very calm, asked:
“First, is it true? Who can assert such a thing, short of taking them in the act?”
Mme. Bondel bounced in her chair.
“What? Who can assert it? Why, everyone! everyone! A thing like that is as plain as the nose on your face. Everyone knows it, everyone talks about it. There’s no question about it. It’s as well known as a public holiday.”
He sniggered.
“And for a long time people believed that the sun moved round the earth, and a thousand other equally well-known things, which were untrue. This man adores his wife; he talks about her with affection and respect. It’s not true.”
She stammered, stamping her foot:
“And considering what he knows, fool, half-wit, defrauded wretch that he is!”
Bondel did not lose his temper; he argued:
“Pardon me. The man is not stupid. He seemed to me, on the contrary, exceptionally intelligent and very acute; and you won’t make me believe that an intelligent man would not notice such a thing in his house when his neighbours, who are not there in his house, are conversant with every detail of this adultery, for I’ll warrant they are conversant with every detail.”
Mme. Bondel gave way to a spasm of angry mirth that jarred her husband’s nerves.
“Oh! oh! oh! You’re all alike, all of you! As if there was a single man in the world who would find it out, unless one rubbed his nose in it.”
The discussion took another form. She became heated on the question of the blindness of deceived husbands, which he called in doubt and she asserted with an air of such personal scorn that he finally lost his temper.
The quarrel became a violent one in which she took the side of women and he defended men.
He had the folly to declare:
“Well, I take my oath that if I had been deceived, I should have seen it, and at once too. And I would have cured you of your fancy in such a fashion that it would have needed more than a doctor to put you on your feet again.”
She was transported with rage and shouted in his face:
“You? You! Why, you’re as stupid as any of them, do you hear?”
He asserted again:
“I take my oath I’m not.”
She burst into so impudent a laugh that he felt his pulses quicken and his skin creep.
For the third time, he said:
“I should have seen it, I should!”
She got up, still laughing in the same way.
“No, it’s too much,” she got out.
And she went out, slamming the door.