work, as if he had said to himself, "I have lost my paper-basket!"

"Why, madame, may we not think him happy in having a lovely wife,
happy in her decorating his paper-baskets so charmingly? The colors
are red and black, like Robin Goodfellow. If ever I marry, I only hope
that twelve years after, my wife's embroidered baskets may still be
for me."

"And why should they not be for you?" said the lady, fixing her fine
gray eyes, full of invitation, on Etienne's face.

"Parisians believe in nothing," said the lawyer bitterly. "The virtue
of women is doubted above all things with terrible insolence. Yes, for
some time past the books you have written, you Paris authors, your
farces, your dramas, all your atrocious literature, turn on
adultery--"

"Come, come, Monsieur the Public Prosecutor," retorted Etienne,
laughing, "I left you to play your game in peace, I did not attack
you, and here you are bringing an indictment against me. On my honor
as a journalist, I have launched above a hundred articles against the
writers you speak of; but I confess that in attacking them it was to
attempt something like criticism. Be just; if you condemn them, you
must condemn Homer, whose _Iliad_ turns on Helen of Troy; you must
condemn Milton's _Paradise Lost_. Eve and her serpent seem to me a
pretty little case of symbolical adultery; you must suppress the
Psalms of David, inspired by the highly adulterous love affairs of
that Louis XIV. of Judah; you must make a bonfire of _Mithridate, le
Tartuffe, l'Ecole des Femmes, Phedre, Andromaque, le Mariage de
Figaro_, Dante's _Inferno_, Petrarch's Sonnets, all the works of