A Street of Paris and Its Inhabitant

"At the Iena bridge," repeats the janitor. "M. Marmus was coming back from Passy. He had dined, doubtless, with M. Planchette, one of his friends of the Academy."

"He couldn't tell me his address," says the cab driver.

"He lives in the Rue Duguay-Trouin, Number three," says the janitor.

"What a neighborhood!" exclaims the driver.

"My friend," asks of the janitor the professor who had found the door shut, "is there no meeting of the Academy to-day?"

"To-day!" exclaims the janitor. "At this hour!"

"What is the time?" asks the man of science.

"About eight o'clock," the janitor replies.

"It is late," comments M. Marmus. "Take me home, driver."

The driver goes through the quays, the Rue du Bac, falls into a tangle of wagons, returns by the Rue de Grenelle, the Croix-Rouge, the Rue Cassette, then he makes a mistake. He tries to find the Rue d'Assas, in the Rue Honore-Chevalier, in the Rue Madame, in all the impossible streets and, swearing that if he had known he would not have come so far for a hundred sous, disembarks the professor in the Rue Duguay-Trouin.

The cab driver claims an hour, for the police ordinances, that defend consumers of time in cabs from the stratagems of cab drivers, had not yet posted the walls of Paris with their protecting articles that settle in advance all difficulties.

"Very well, my friend," says M. Marmus to the cab driver. "Pay him," M. Marmus says to Madame Adolphe. "I do not feel well, my child."

"Monsieur, what did I tell you?" she exclaimed. "You have eaten too much. While you were away, I said to myself, 'It is Mme. Vernet's birthday. They will urge him at table and he will come back sick.' Well, go to bed. I will make camomile tea for you."

VII

DESSERT

The professor walked through the garden into a pavilion at one of its corners, where he lived alone in order not to be disturbed by his wife.

He went up the stairway leading to his little room, and complained so much of his pains in the stomach that Madame Adolphe filled him with camomile tea.

"Ah, here is a carriage! It is Madame returning in great anxiety, I am sure," said Madame Adolphe, giving to the professor his sixth cup of camomile tea. "Now, sir, I hope that you will be able to drink it without me. Do not let it fall all over your bed. You know how Madame would laugh. You are very happy to have a little wife who is so amiable and so joyful."

"Say nothing to her, my child," exclaimed the professor, whose features expressed a sort of childish fear.

The truly great man is always more or less a child.

VIII

THIS SHOWS THAT THE WIFE OF A MAN OF SCIENCE IS VERY UNHAPPY

"Well, good-bye. Return in the cab, it is paid for," Madame Marmus was saying when Madame Adolphe arrived at the door.

The cab had already turned the corner. Madame Adolphe, not having seen Madame Marmus's escort, said to herself:

"Poor Madame! He must be her nephew."

Madame Marmus, a little woman, lithe, graceful, mirthful, was divinely dressed and in a fashion too young for her age, counting her twenty-five years as a wife. Nevertheless, she wore well a gown with small pink stripes, a cape embroidered and edged with lace, boots pretty as the wings of a butterfly. She carried in her hand a pink hat with peach flowers.

"You see, Madame Adolphe," she said, "my hair is all uncurled. I told you that in this hot weather it should be dressed in bandeaux."

"Madame," the servant replied, "Monsieur is very sick. You let him eat too much."

"What could I do?" Madame Marmus replied. "He was at one end of the table and I at the other. He returned without me, as his habit is! Poor little man! I will go to him as soon as I change my dress."

Madame Adolphe returns to the pavilion to propose an emetic, and scolds the professor for not having returned with Madame Marmus.

"Since you wished to come in a cab, you might have spared me the expense of the one that Madame Marmus took. The charge for your cab was an hour. Did you stop anywhere?"

"At the Institute," he replied.

"At the Institute! Where did you take the cab?" she asked.

"In front of a bridge, I think," he replied.

"Was it still daylight?" she asked.

"Almost," he said.

"Then you did not go to Madame Vernet's!" exclaimed Madame Adolphe.

"Why did you not come to Madame Vernet's?" asked his wife.

Madame Marmus, having come to the door on the tips of her toes, had heard Madame Adolphe's exclamation. She did not wish to see Madame Adolphe's astonishment. Surely Madame Adolphe could not have forgotten the assurance with which the professor's wife had placed him in imagination at Madame Vernet's table.

"My dear child, I do not know," said the professor in a repentant tone.

"Then you have not dined," said Madame Marmus, whose attitude remained that of the purest innocence.

"With what could he have dined, Madame? He had two sous," said Madame Adolphe, looking at Madame Marmus with an accusing air.

"Ah, I am truly to be pitied, my poor Madame Adolphe," said Madame Marmus. "This sort of thing has been going on for twenty years, and I am not yet accustomed to it. Six days after our wedding, we were going out of our room one morning to take breakfast. M. Marmus hears the drum of the Polytechnic School pupils of whom he was the professor. He quits me to go and see them pass. I was nineteen years of age and when I pouted, you cannot guess what he said to me. He said, 'These young people are the flower and the glory of France!' This is how my marriage began. You can judge of the rest."

"Oh, Monsieur, is it possible?" asked Madame Adolphe with an indignant air.

"I have cornered Sinard!" exclaimed M. Marmus triumphantly.

"Oh, he would let himself die!" exclaimed Madame Adolphe.

"Get something for him to eat," said Madame Marmus. "He would let himself do anything. Ah, my good Madame Adolphe, a man of science, you see, is a man who knows nothing – of life."

The malady was cured by a cataplasm of Italian cheese that the man of science ate without knowing what he was eating, for he held Sinard in a corner —

"Poor Madame," said the kind Madame Adolphe. "I pity you. He was really so absent-minded as that!"

And Madame Adolphe forgot the strange avowal of her mistress.