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?‰mile, 1840-1902

"Four Short Stories By Emile Zola"

Undying, unchanging
love was what he wished for. However, she had sworn, and he paid her as
having done so. But he felt that she was untruthful, incapable of
common fidelity, apt to yield to friends, to stray passers-by, like a
good-natured animal, born to live minus a shift.
One morning when he saw Foucarmont emerging from her bedroom at an
unusual hour, he made a scene about it. But in her weariness of his
jealousy she grew angry directly. On several occasions ere that she had
behaved rather prettily. Thus the evening when he surprised her with
Georges she was the first to regain her temper and to confess herself
in the wrong. She had loaded him with caresses and dosed him with soft
speeches in order to make him swallow the business. But he had ended
by boring her to death with his obstinate refusals to understand the
feminine nature, and now she was brutal.
"Very well, yes! I've slept with Foucarmont. What then? That's flattened
you out a bit, my little rough, hasn't it?"
It was the first time she had thrown "my little rough" in his teeth. The
frank directness of her avowal took his breath away, and when he began
clenching his fists she marched up to him and looked him full in the
face.


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