“It was your own fault,” said she, laughing.  “If you had allowed yourself by reason of your great love to be ridiculed, made a fool of, and bantered a few more times, you might have made an impression on me, like the others.”  Thereupon Carandas commenced to laugh, though inwardly raging all the time.  Seeing the chest where he had nearly been suffocated, his anger increased the more violently because the sweet creature had become still more beautiful, like all those who are permanently youthful from bathing in the water of youth, which waters are naught less than the sources of love.  The mechanician studied the proceedings in the way of cuckoldom at his neighbour’s house, in order to revenge himself, for as many houses as there are so many varieties of manner are there in this business; and although all amours resemble each other in the same manner that all men resemble each other, it is proved to the abstractors of true things, that for the happiness of women, each love has its especial physiognomy, and if there is nothing that resembles a man so much as a man, there is also nothing differs from a man so much as a man.  That it is, which confuses all things, or explains the thousand fancies of women, who seek the best men with a thousand pains and a thousand pleasures, perhaps more the one than the other.  But how can I blame them for their essays, changes, and contradictory aims?  Why, Nature frisks and wriggles, twists and turns about, and you expect a woman to remain still!  Do you know if ice is really cold?  No.  Well then, neither do you know that cuckoldom is not a lucky chance, the produce of brains well furnished and better made than all the others.  Seek something better than ventosity beneath the sky.  This will help to spread the philosophic reputation of this eccentric book.  Oh yes; go on.  He who cries “vermin powder,” is more advanced than those who occupy themselves with Nature, seeing that she is a proud jade and a capricious one, and only allows herself to be seen at certain times.  Do you understand?  So in all languages does she belong to the feminine gender, being a thing essentially changeable and fruitful and fertile in tricks.

Now Carandas soon recognised the fact that among cuckoldoms the best understood and the most discreet is ecclesiastical cuckoldom.  This is how the good dyer’s wife had laid her plans.  She went always towards her cottage at Grenadiere-les-St.-Cyr on the eve of the Sabbath, leaving her good husband to finish his work, to count up and check his books, and to pay his workmen; then Taschereau would join her there on the morrow, and always found a good breakfast ready and his good wife gay, and always brought the priest with him.  The fact is, this damnable priest crossed the Loire the night before in a small boat, in order to keep the dyer’s wife warm, and to calm her fancies, in order that she might sleep well during the night, a duty which young men understand very well.  Then this fine curber of phantasies got