“Alas, sir,” answered the sailor, “I have been already greatly punished; and it is a long time since my troubles began.  Money, wickedly acquired, brings no good.  On arriving home, I bought the wretched meadow for much more than it was worth; and the day I walked over it, feeling that is was actually mine, closed my happiness.  Claudine was a coquette; but she had a great many other vices.  When she realised how much money we had these vices showed themselves, just like a fire, smouldering at the bottom of the hold, bursts forth when you open the hatches.  From slightly greedy as she had been, she became a regular glutton.  In our house there was feasting without end.  Whenever I went to sea, she would entertain the worst women in the place; and there was nothing too good or too expensive for them.  She would get so drunk that she would have to be put to bed.  Well, one night, when she thought me at Rouen, I returned unexpectedly.  I entered, and found her with a man.  And such a man, sir!  A miserable looking wretch, ugly, dirty, stinking; shunned by everyone; in a word the bailiff’s clerk.  I should have killed him, like the vermin that he was; it was my right, but he was such a pitiful object.  I took him by the neck and pitched him out of the window, without opening it!  It didn’t kill him.  Then I fell upon my wife, and beat her until she couldn’t stir.”

Lerouge spoke in a hoarse voice, every now and then thrusting his fists into his eyes.

“I pardoned her,” he continued; “but the man who beats his wife and then pardons her is lost.  In the future, she took better precautions, became a greater hypocrite, and that was all.  In the meanwhile, Madame Gerdy took back her child; and Claudine had nothing more to restrain her.  Protected and counselled by her mother, whom she had taken to live with us, on the pretence of looking after Jacques, she managed to deceive me for more than a year.  I thought she had given up her bad habits, but not at all; she lived a most disgraceful life.  My house became the resort of all the good-for-nothing rogues in the country, for whom my wife brought out bottles of wine and brandy, whenever I was away at sea, and they got drunk promiscuously.  When money failed, she wrote to the count or his mistress, and the orgies continued.  Occasionally I had doubts which disturbed me; and then without reason, for a simple yes or no, I would beat her until I was tired, and then I would forgive her, like a coward, like a fool.  It was a cursed life.  I don’t know which gave me the most pleasure, embracing her or beating her.  My neighbors despised me, and turned their backs on me; they believed me an accomplice or a willing dupe.  I heard, afterwards, that they believed I profited by my wife’s misconduct; while in reality she paid her lovers.  At all events, people wondered where all the money came from that was spent in my house.  To distinguish me from a cousin of mine, also named Lerouge, they tacked an infamous word on to my name.  What disgrace!  And I knew nothing of all the scandal, no, nothing.  Was I not the husband?  Fortunately, though, my poor father was dead.”