“Monsieur de Breuilly!” said the marquis, as he presented me to the punctilious gentleman, “my best friend, who will infallibly become yours also, and who, quite as infallibly, will cut your throat if you attempt to show any attention to his wife.”

“Mon Dieu! my dear friend,” replied Monsieur de Breuilly, with a laugh that was anything but joyful, and accentuating each word in his peculiar style, “why represent me to this gentleman as a Norman Othello?  Monsieur may surely—­monsieur is perfectly free to—­besides, he knows and can observe the proper limits of things.  At any rate, sir, here is Madame de Breuilly; suffer me to recommend her myself to your kind attentions.”

Somewhat surprised at this language, I had the simplicity, or perhaps the innocent malice, of interpreting it literally.  I sat down squarely by the side of Madame de Breuilly, and I began paying her marked attention, while, however, “observing the proper limits of things.”  In the meantime, Monsieur de Breuilly was watching us from a distance, with an extraordinary countenance.  I could see his little gray eyes sparkling like glowing ashes; he was laughing loud, grinning, stamping, and fairly disjointing his fingers with sinister cracks.  Monsieur de Malouet came suddenly to me, handed me a whist card, and taking me aside: 

“What the duse has got into you?” he said.

“Into me? why, nothing!”

“Have I not warned you?  It’s quite a serious matter.  Look at Breuilly!  It is the only weakness of that gallant man; every one respects it here.  Do likewise, I beg of you.”

From the weakness of that gallant man, it results that his wife is condemned in society to perpetual quarantine.  The fighting propensities of a husband are often but an additional attraction for the lightning; but men hesitate to risk their lives without any prospect of possible compensation, and we have here a man who threatens you at least with a public scandal, not only before harvest, as they say, but even before the seed has been fairly sown.  Such a state of affairs manifestly discourages the most enterprising, and it is quite rare that Madame de Breuilly has not two vacant seats on her right and on her left, despite her nonchalant grace, despite her great creole eyes, and despite her plaintive and beseeching looks, that seem to be ever saying:  “Mon Dieu! will no one lead me into temptation?”

You would doubtless think that the evident neglect in which the poor wife lives ought to be, for her husband, a motive of security.  Not at all!  His ingenious mania manages to discover in that fact a fresh motive of perplexity.

“My friend,” he was saying yesterday to Monsieur de Malouet, “you know that I am no more jealous than any one else; but without being Orosmane, I do not pretend to be George Dandin.  Well! one thing troubles me, my friend; have you noticed that apparently no one pays any attention to my wife?”