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 him from the mire, he was not so proud! Your name, I suppose? Your title? Oh! clean they were, indeed, this name and title, on which the usurers were unwilling to advance you another hundred sous. You can take them back, and welcome. And he talks of his nobility, of his ancestors, this Monsieur whom I have bought and whom I support! Well, the nobility will have nothing more from me,—not that! And, as for your ancestors, you scoundrel, you can try to hang them up. You will see whether you can borrow even ten sous on their ugly mugs,—mugs of veterans and valets. Nothing more, do you hear? Never, never! Back to your gaming-tables, trickster! Back to your prostitutes, pimp!"

She was frightful. Monsieur, timid, trembling, with cowardly back and humiliated eye, retired before this flood of filth. He reached the door, noticed me, and fled, and Madame again cried after him, in the passage-way, in a voice which had become more hoarse and horrible:

"Pimp! Dirty pimp!"

And she sank upon her long chair, overcome by a terrible nervous attack, which I finally quieted by making her inhale an entire flask of ether.

Then Madame began again the reading of her love stories and the rearrangement of her drawers. Monsieur was more absorbed than ever in the complexities of solitaire and in the revision of his