The discussion gradually grew more heated, always on the same subject for lack of others.  Madame Bondel obstinately refused to say what she had heard about these neighbors, allowing things to be understood without saying exactly what they were.  Bendel would shrug his shoulders, grin, and exasperate his wife.  She finally cried out:  “Well! that gentleman is deceived by his wife, there!”

The husband answered quietly:  “I can’t see how that affects the honor of a man.”

She seemed dumfounded:  “What! you don’t see?—­you don’t see?—­well, that’s too much!  You don’t see!—­why, it’s a public scandal! he is disgraced!”

He answered:  “Ah! by no means!  Should a man be considered disgraced because he is deceived, because he is betrayed, robbed?  No, indeed!  I’ll grant you that that may be the case for the wife, but as for him—­”

She became furious, exclaiming:  “For him as well as for her.  They are both in disgrace; it’s a public shame.”

Bondel, very calm, asked:  “First of all, is it true?  Who can assert such a thing as long as no one has been caught in the act?”

Madame Bondel was growing uneasy; she snapped:  “What?  Who can assert it?  Why, everybody! everybody! it’s as clear as the nose on your face.  Everybody knows it and is talking about it.  There is not the slightest doubt.”

He was grinning:  “For a long time people thought that the sun revolved around the earth.  This man loves his wife and speaks of her tenderly and reverently.  This whole business is nothing but lies!”

Stamping her foot, she stammered:  “Do you think that that fool, that idiot, knows anything about it?”

Bondel did not grow angry; he was reasoning clearly:  “Excuse me.  This gentleman is no fool.  He seemed to me, on the contrary, to be very intelligent and shrewd; and you can’t make me believe that a man with brains doesn’t notice such a thing in his own house, when the neighbors, who are not there, are ignorant of no detail of this liaison—­for I’ll warrant that they know everything.”

Madame Bondel had a fit of angry mirth, which irritated her husband’s nerves.  She laughed:  “Ha! ha! ha! they’re all the same!  There’s not a man alive who could discover a thing like that unless his nose was stuck into it!”

The discussion was wandering to other topics now.  She was exclaiming over the blindness of deceived husbands, a thing which he doubted and which she affirmed with such airs of personal contempt that he finally grew angry.  Then the discussion became an angry quarrel, where she took the side of the women and he defended the men.  He had the conceit to declare:  “Well, I swear that if I had ever been deceived, I should have noticed it, and immediately, too.  And I should have taken away your desire for such things in such a manner that it would have taken more than one doctor to set you on foot again!”

Boiling with anger, she cried out to him:  “You! you! why, you’re as big a fool as the others, do you hear!”