The narrator of this old story was a tall spare man, with light eyes and brown hair, and the author thought he saw in him a vague resemblance to the demon who had before this tormented him; but the stranger did not show the cloven foot.  Suddenly the word adultery sounded in the ears of the author; and this word woke up in his imagination the most mournful countenances of that procession which before this had streamed by on the utterance of the magic syllables.  From that evening he was haunted and persecuted by dreams of a work which did not yet exist; and at no period of his life was the author assailed with such delusive notions about the fatal subject of this book.  But he bravely resisted the fiend, although the latter referred the most unimportant incidents of life to this unknown work, and like a customhouse officer set his stamp of mockery upon every occurrence.

Some days afterwards the author found himself in the company of two ladies.  The first of them had been one of the most refined and the most intellectual women of Napoleon’s court.  In his day she occupied a lofty position, but the sudden appearance of the Restoration caused her downfall; she became a recluse.  The second, who was young and beautiful, was at that time living at Paris the life of a fashionable woman.  They were friends, because, the one being forty and the other twenty-two years old, they were seldom rivals on the same field.  The author was considered quite insignificant by the first of the two ladies, and since the other soon discovered this, they carried on in his presence the conversation which they had begun in a frank discussion of a woman’s lot.

“Have you noticed, dear, that women in general bestow their love only upon a fool?”

“What do you mean by that, duchess?  And how can you make your remark fit in with the fact that they have an aversion for their husbands?”

“These women are absolute tyrants!” said the author to himself.  “Has the devil again turned up in a mob cap?”

“No, dear, I am not joking,” replied the duchess, “and I shudder with fear for myself when I coolly consider people whom I have known in other times.  Wit always has a sparkle which wounds us, and the man who has much of it makes us fear him perhaps, and if he is a proud man he will be capable of jealousy, and is not therefore to our taste.  In fact, we prefer to raise a man to our own height rather than to have to climb up to his.  Talent has great successes for us to share in, but the fool affords enjoyment to us; and we would sooner hear said ’that is a very handsome man’ than to see our lover elected to the Institute.”

“That’s enough, duchess!  You have absolutely startled me.”

And the young coquette began to describe the lovers about whom all the women of her acquaintance raved; there was not a single man of intellect among them.

“But I swear by my virtue,” she said, “their husbands are worth more.”