“I say nothing of the cost of housekeeping,” he said in conclusion.  “You may give your friends cake and tea in the evening, for you must have some amusement.  But I, who spent but fifteen hundred francs a year as a bachelor, now spend six thousand, including rates and repairs, and this is rather too much in relation to the nature of our property.  A winegrower is never sure of what his expenses may be—­the making, the duty, the casks—­while the returns depend on a scorching day or a sudden frost.  Small owners, like us, whose income is far from being fixed, must base their estimates on their minimum, for they have no means of making up a deficit or a loss.  What would become of us if a wine merchant became bankrupt?  In my opinion, promissory notes are so many cabbage-leaves.  To live as we are living, we ought always to have a year’s income in hand and count on no more than two-thirds of our returns.”

Any form of resistance is enough to make a woman vow to subdue it; Dinah flung herself against a will of iron padded round with gentleness.  She tried to fill the little man’s soul with jealousy and alarms, but it was stockaded with insolent confidence.  He left Dinah, when he went to Paris, with all the conviction of Medor in Angelique’s fidelity.  When she affected cold disdain, to nettle this changeling by the scorn a courtesan sometimes shows to her “protector,” and which acts on him with the certainty of the screw of a winepress, Monsieur de la Baudraye gazed at his wife with fixed eyes, like those of a cat which, in the midst of domestic broils, waits till a blow is threatened before stirring from its place.  The strange, speechless uneasiness that was perceptible under his mute indifference almost terrified the young wife of twenty; she could not at first understand the selfish quiescence of this man, who might be compared to a cracked pot, and who, in order to live, regulated his existence with the unchangeable regularity which a clockmaker requires of a clock.  So the little man always evaded his wife, while she always hit out, as it were, ten feet above his head.

Dinah’s fits of fury when she saw herself condemned never to escape from La Baudraye and Sancerre are more easily imagined than described —­she who had dreamed of handling a fortune and managing the dwarf whom she, the giant, had at first humored in order to command.  In the hope of some day making her appearance on the greater stage of Paris, she accepted the vulgar incense of her attendant knights with a view to seeing Monsieur de la Baudraye’s name drawn from the electoral urn; for she supposed him to be ambitious, after seeing him return thrice from Paris, each time a step higher on the social ladder.  But when she struck on the man’s heart, it was as though she had tapped on marble!  The man who had been Receiver-General and Referendary, who was now Master of Appeals, Officer of the Legion of Honor, and Royal Commissioner, was but a mole throwing up its little hills round and round a vineyard!  Then some lamentations were poured into the heart of the Public Prosecutor, of the Sous-prefet, even of Monsieur Gravier, and they all increased in their devotion to this sublime victim; for, like all women, she never mentioned her speculative schemes, and —­again like all women—­finding such speculation vain, she ceased to speculate.