Artists' Wives by Alphonse Daudet (best non fiction books of all time .txt) 📕

Provided he leaves me free to amuse myself as I choose, I can undertake to give him all he lacks!' And from that day forth, money, orders, decorations from all countries kept pouring in upon your studio, with their pretty metallic sound and their many-coloured ribbons. Look at the row on my lapel. Then one fine morning, Madame was seized with the fancy--a fancy of beauty on the wane--to be the wife of an Academician, and it is her delicately gloved hand that has opened before you one by one all the doors of the sanctuary. Ah! my poor old fellow, your colleagues alone can tell you what all these green palms have cost you!"
"You lie, you lie!" screamed Guillardin, half choked by indignation.
"Ah no! my old friend, indeed I do not lie. You need only to look around you presently, when you enter the reception hall. You will see a malicious gleam in every eye, a smile at the corner of every lip, while they will whisper as you pass by: 'Here is the beautiful Madame Guillardin's husband.' For you will never be anything else in life, my dear fellow, but the husband of a pretty woman."
This time, Guillardin could bear it no longer. Pale with rage, he bounded forward, to seize and dash into the fire, after first tearing from it the pretty green palm wreath, this insolent and raving coat; but a door opens and a well-known voice, tinged with a mixture of contempt and mild condescension, opportunely awakes him from his horrible nightmare:
"Oh! that is just like you, asleep at the corner of the fire on such an important day!"
And Madame Guillardin stands before him, tall and still handsome, although rather too imposing with her almost natural pink complexion, her powdered hair, and the exaggerated brilliancy of her painted eyes. With the gesture of the superior woman, she takes up the green-palmed coat, and briskly, with a little smile, helps her husband to don it; while he, poor man, still trembling with the horrors of his nightmare, draws a deep sigh of relief and thinks to himself: "Thank goodness! It was a dream!"
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Publication Date: 11-25-2009

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