“No, hold your tongue, will you?  If you weren’t brutes you would be as nice with your wives as you are with us, and if your wives weren’t geese they would take as much pains to keep you as we do to get you.  That’s the way to behave.  Yes, my duck, you can put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

“Do not talk of honest women,” he said in a hard voice.  “You do not know them.”

At that Nana rose to her knees.

“I don’t know them!  Why, they aren’t even clean, your honest women aren’t!  They aren’t even clean!  I defy you to find me one who would dare show herself as I am doing.  Oh, you make me laugh with your honest women.  Don’t drive me to it; don’t oblige me to tell you things I may regret afterward.”

The count, by way of answer, mumbled something insulting.  Nana became quite pale in her turn.  For some seconds she looked at him without speaking.  Then in her decisive way: 

“What would you do if your wife were deceiving you?”

He made a threatening gesture.

“Well, and if I were to?”

“Oh, you,” he muttered with a shrug of his shoulders.

Nana was certainly not spiteful.  Since the beginning of the conversation she had been strongly tempted to throw his cuckold’s reputation in his teeth, but she had resisted.  She would have liked to confess him quietly on the subject, but he had begun to exasperate her at last.  The matter ought to stop now.

“Well, then, my dearie,” she continued, “I don’t know what you’re getting at with me.  For two hours past you’ve been worrying my life out.  Now do just go and find your wife, for she’s at it with Fauchery.  Yes, it’s quite correct; they’re in the Rue Taitbout, at the corner of the Rue de Provence.  You see, I’m giving you the address.”

Then triumphantly, as she saw Muffat stagger to his feet like an ox under the hammer: 

“If honest women must meddle in our affairs and take our sweethearts from us—­Oh, you bet they’re a nice lot, those honest women!”

But she was unable to proceed.  With a terrible push he had cast her full length on the floor and, lifting his heel, he seemed on the point of crushing in her head in order to silence her.  For the twinkling of an eye she felt sickening dread.  Blinded with rage, he had begun beating about the room like a maniac.  Then his choking silence and the struggle with which he was shaken melted her to tears.  She felt a mortal regret and, rolling herself up in front of the fire so as to roast her right side, she undertook the task of comforting him.

“I take my oath, darling, I thought you knew it all.  Otherwise I shouldn’t have spoken; you may be sure.  But perhaps it isn’t true.  I don’t say anything for certain.  I’ve been told it, and people are talking about it, but what does that prove?  Oh, get along!  You’re very silly to grow riled about it.  If I were a man I shouldn’t care a rush for the women!  All the women are alike, you see, high or low; they’re all rowdy and the rest of it.”