‘Now, what do you think of doing?’ he said to him, looking at him intently.

‘What do you advise?’

‘I acknowledge that such a proceeding seems hard for you to endure. On the other hand I would be vexed to see you engaged in a duel with this swashbuckler Pelletier.’

‘A swashbuckler!’ cried Bouchereau, whose eyes seemed to grow bigger. ‘It’s a professional duellist, it’s an assassin you ought to say, a man who spends all his mornings at Lepage’s shooting gallery, or in the fencing school, and who has a fight on hand regularly every three months!’

‘And you yourself,’ said the doctor with a piercing look, ‘you have had an affair sometimes?’

‘Never,’ answered the married man, more livid than ever in that moment, ‘not that I haven’t had an opportunity several times, but a duel is against my principles. The idea of shedding blood revolts me; it is a barbarous custom, which has always appeared to me to constitute a monstrous anomaly amidst our police-guarded habits.’

‘In short, you have no ardent desire to meet him on the field?’

‘If I were positively insulted, if I had to avenge a mortal injury, perhaps the voice of passion would speak to me more loudly than that of humanity; for, in certain conjunctures, the wisest man cannot answer for himself. But here, since things have not been pushed to the extreme, if Pelletier, instead of adopting an arrogant tone, had offered me some kind of apology or other, to which I believe myself entitled, and if he had bound himself to behave better in future, it seems to me that then—in everybody’s interest—to avoid a scandal—don’t you think like me, that it would have been possible and honourable—’

‘Not to fight? Certainly,’ interrupted Magnan. ‘If you meet him on the field, it’s ten to one that Pelletier will bleed you like a chicken, and that’ll be nasty for you.’

‘Doctor, you don’t understand me properly.’

‘Absolutely, on the contrary. And the proof is, that you will not fight, and that the captain will make a satisfactory apology to you. Isn’t that what you want?’

The doctor’s perspicacity caused a feeble blush to dawn on the cheeks of the peace-lover.

‘Pelletier is a bear,’ went on the doctor, as if speaking to himself. ‘Usually staff officers have more savoir vivre than that. To want to please the women, that’s all right; but to challenge the husbands, that’s a total disregard of all the rules of good breeding.’

‘You advise me, then, to let some settlement be made?’ asked Bouchereau in an insinuating voice.

‘Yes, certainly,’ answered the doctor laughing, ‘and, more than that, I’ll undertake the negotiations. I tell you once again! to-morrow Pelletier will withdraw his provocation; he will make you a formal apology, and will swear to seek no more to trouble your conjugal repose. That is my business; the rest is your affair.’

‘The rest?’

‘To promise and to keep one’s word aren’t the same thing, you know that; it will be, I think, on your part, highly prudent to make it easy for the captain to keep his oath, by means of a little voyage which will separate him from Madame Bouchereau for some months. His position keeps him in Paris; you are free. What hinders you from going to spend the winter in the south: at Nice, for instance?’