"
"I will pay him as much in an annuity," said Baron Montes. "We will
leave Paris and go----"
"Where?" said Valerie, with one of the pretty sneers by which a woman
makes fun of a man she is sure of. "Paris is the only place where we
can live happy. I care too much for your love to risk seeing it die
out in a _tete-a-tete_ in the wilderness. Listen, Henri, you are the
only man I care for in the whole world. Write that down clearly in
your tiger's brain."
For women, when they have made a sheep of a man, always tell him that
he is a lion with a will of iron.
"Now, attend to me. Monsieur Marneffe has not five years to live; he
is rotten to the marrow of his bones. He spends seven months of the
twelve in swallowing drugs and decoctions; he lives wrapped in
flannel; in short, as the doctor says, he lives under the scythe, and
may be cut off at any moment. An illness that would not harm another
man would be fatal to him; his blood is corrupt, his life undermined
at the root. For five years I have never allowed him to kiss me--he is
poisonous! Some day, and the day is not far off, I shall be a widow.
Well, then, I--who have already had an offer from a man with sixty
thousand francs a year, I who am as completely mistress of that man as
I am of this lump of sugar--I swear to you that if you were as poor as
Hulot and as foul as Marneffe, if you beat me even, still you are the
only man I will have for a husband, the only man I love, or whose name
I will ever bear.
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