You know me.
Wave a hand to me, duck your head to me, crack the whip or nod when I pass.

I am M'sieu' Jean Jacques, philosopher." And all the while he had only been vaguely, not really, conscious of his wife and child.

He did not know that he had only made of his wife an incident in his life, in spite of the fact that he thought he loved her; that he had been proud of her splendid personality; and that, with passionate chivalry, he had resented any criticism of her.
He thought still, as he did on the Antoine, that Carmen's figure had the lines of the Venus of Milo, that her head would have been a model either for a Madonna, or for Joan of Arc, or the famous Isabella of Aragon.
Having visited the Louvre and the Luxembourg all in one day, he felt he was entitled to make such comparisons, and that in making them he was on sure ground.

He had loved to kiss Carmen in the neck, it was so full and soft and round; and when she went about the garden with her dress shortened, and he saw her ankles, even after he had been married thirteen years, and she was thirty-four, he still admired, he still thought that the world was a good place when it produced such a woman.
And even when she had lashed him with her tongue, as she did sometimes, he still laughed--after the smart was over--because he liked spirit.
He would never have a horse that had not some blood, and he had never driven a sluggard in his life more than once.

But wife and child and world, and all that therein was, existed largely because they were necessary to Jean Jacques.
That is the way it had been; and it was as though the firmament had been rolled up before his eyes, exposing the everlasting mysteries, when he saw his wife in the arms of the master-carpenter.