being able to fix his suspicions on any one. Could a man have dictated that letter? Who was that man? Equal uncertainty on this point. The majority of his acquaintances were jealous of him, and, no doubt, hated him. "I must consult my wife," he said to himself through habit, as he got up from the arm-chair in which he had collapsed.
"Great God!" he said aloud before he got up, striking his head, "it is she above all of whom I must be distrustful. At the present moment she is my enemy," and tears came into his eyes through sheer anger.
By a poetic justice for that hardness of heart which constitutes the provincial idea of shrewdness, the two men whom M. de Rênal feared the most at the present moment were his two most intimate friends.
"I have ten friends perhaps after those," and he passed them in review, gauging the degree of consolation which he could get from each one. "All of them, all of them," he exclaimed in a rage, "will derive the most supreme pleasure from my awful experience."
As luck would have it, he thought himself envied, and not without reason. Apart from his superb town mansion in which the king of had recently spent the night, and thus conferred on it an enduring honour, he had decorated his château at Vergy extremely well. The façade was painted white and the windows adorned with fine green shutters. He was consoled for a moment by the thought of this magnificence. The fact was that this château was seen from three or four leagues off, to the great prejudice of all the country houses or so-called châteaux of the neighbourhood, which had been left in the humble grey colour given them by time.
There was one of his friends on whose pity and whose tears M. de Rênal could count, the churchwarden of the parish; but he was an idiot who cried at everything. This man, however, was his only resource. "What unhappiness is comparable to mine," he exclaimed with rage. "What isolation!"
"Is it possible?" said this truly pitiable man to himself. "Is it possible that I have no friend in my misfortune of whom I can ask advice? for my mind is wandering, I feel it. "Oh, Falcoz! oh, Ducros!" he exclaimed with bitterness. Those were the names of two friends of his childhood whom
