[Footnote 20:  The Cocu Imaginaire (The Imaginary Cuckold), in Moliere’s play of that name.]

Furious at having been duped, he set a whole private inquiry agency to work, continually acted a part, and one evening appeared unexpectedly with a commissary of police in the snug little bachelor’s quarters which concealed his wife’s escapades.

Therese, who was terribly frightened, and at her wits’ end at being thus surprised in all the disorder of her lover’s apartments, and pale with shame and terror, hid herself behind the bed curtains, while he, who was an officer of dragoons, very much vexed at being mixed up in such a pinchbeck scandal, and at being caught in a silk shirt by these men who were so correctly dressed in frock coats, frowned angrily, and had to restrain himself so as not to fling his victim out of a window.

The police commissary, who was calmly looking at this little scene with the coolness of an amateur, prepared to verify the fact that they were caught flagrante delicto, and in an ironical voice said to her husband, who had claimed his services: 

“I must ask for your name in full, Monsieur?”

“Charles Joseph Edward Dupontel,” was the answer.  And as the commissary was writing it down from his dictation, he added suddenly:  “Du Pontel in two words, if you please, Monsieur le Commissionaire!”

THE CARTER’S WENCH

The driver, who had jumped from his box, and was now walking slowly by the side of his thin horses, waking them up every moment by a cut of the whip, or a coarse oath, pointed to the top of the hill, where the windows of a solitary house, in which the inhabitants were still up, although it was very late and quite dark, were shining like yellow lamps, and said to me: 

“One gets a good drop there, Monsieur, and well served, by George.”

And his eyes flashed in his thin, sunburnt face, which was of a deep brickdust color, while he smacked his lips like a drunkard, who remembers a bottle of good liquor that he has lately drunk, and drawing himself up in a blouse like a vulgar swell, he shivered like the back of an ox, when it is sharply pricked with the goad.

“Yes, and well served by a wench who will turn your head for you before you have tilted your elbow and drank a glass!”

The moon was rising behind the snow-covered mountain peaks, which looked almost like blood under its rays, and which were crowned by dark, broken clouds, which whirled about and floated, and reminded the passenger of some terrible Medusa’s head.  The gloomy plains of Capsir, which were traversed by torrents, extensive meadows in which undefined forms were moving about, fields of rye, like huge golden table-covers, and here and there wretched villagers, and broad sheets of water, into which the stars seemed to look in a melancholy manner, opened out to the view.  Damp gusts of winds swept along the road, bringing a strong smell of hay, of resin of unknown flowers, with them, and erratic pieces of rock, which were scattered on the surface like huge boundary stones, had spectral outlines.