“I am going to, sir; but it was necessary to begin at the beginning.  I married.  The evening after the wedding, and when the relatives and guests had departed, I was about to join my wife, when I perceived my father all alone in a corner weeping.  The sight touched my heart, and I had a foreboding of evil; but it quickly passed away.  It is so delightful during the first six months one passes with a dearly loved wife!  One seems to be surrounded by mists that change the very rocks into palaces and temples so completely that novices are taken in.  For two years, in spite of a few little quarrels, everything went on nicely.  Claudine managed me like a child.  Ah, she was cunning!  She might have seized and bound me, and carried me to market and sold me, without my noticing it.  Her great fault was her love of finery.  All that I earned, and my business was very prosperous, she put on her back.  Every week there was something new, dresses, jewels, bonnets, the devil’s baubles, which the dealers invent for the perdition of the female sex.  The neighbors chattered, but I thought it was all right.  At the baptism of our son, who was called Jacques after my father, to please her, I squandered all I had economized during my youth, more than three hundred pistoles, with which I had intended purchasing a meadow that lay in the midst of our property.”

M. Daburon was boiling over with impatience, but he could do nothing.

“Go on, go on,” he said every time Lerouge seemed inclined to stop.

“I was well enough pleased,” continued the sailor, “until one morning I saw one of the Count de Commarin’s servants entering our house; the count’s chateau is only about a mile from where I lived on the other side of the town.  It was a fellow named Germain whom I didn’t like at all.  It was said about the country that he had been mixed up in the seduction of poor Thomassine, a fine young girl who lived near us; she appears to have pleased the count, and one day suddenly disappeared.  I asked my wife what the fellow wanted; she replied that he had come to ask her to take a child to nurse.  I would not hear of it at first, for our means were sufficient to allow Claudine to keep all her milk for our own child.  But she gave me the very best of reasons.  She said she regretted her past flirtations and her extravagance.  She wished to earn a little money, being ashamed of doing nothing while I was killing myself with work.  She wanted to save, to economize, so that our child should not be obliged in his turn to go to sea.  She was to get a very good price, that we could save up to go towards the three hundred pistoles.  That confounded meadow, to which she alluded, decided me.”

“Did she not tell you of the commission with which she was charged?” asked the magistrate.

This question astonished Lerouge.  He thought that there was good reason to say that justice sees and knows everything.