venture to force myself into his confidence. My looks, however,
were not so discreet as my silence, and begged him to speak; so
he responded to their mute appeal.

"After all," he said; "why should I not tell you about it? You
will understand me." And he added, with a look of sudden
ferocity: "She understood it, at any rate!"

"Who?" I asked.

"My strumpet of a wife," he replied. "Ah! Monsieur, what an
abominable creature she was--if you only knew! Yes, she
understood it too well, too well, and that is why I hate her so;
even more on that account, than for having deceived me. For that
is a natural fault, is it not, and may be pardoned? But the other
thing was a crime, a horrible crime."

The woman, who stood against the wooden target every night with
her arms stretched out and her finger extended, and whom the old
mountebank fitted with gloves and with a halo formed of his
knives, which were as sharp as razors and which he planted close
to her, was his wife. She might have been a woman of forty, and
must have been fairly pretty, but with a perverse prettiness; she
had an impudent mouth, a mouth that was at the same time sensual
and bad, with the lower lip too thick for the thin, dry upper
lip.

I had several times noticed that every time he planted a knife in
the board, she uttered a laugh, so low as scarcely to be heard,
but which was very significant when one heard it, for it was a