The workmen manifest mistrust and even dislike towards me. Why? I
don't know; but my good intentions have gradually got weary.

One after another, sundry women have occupied my life. Antonia Véron
was first. Her marriage and mine, their hindrance and restriction,
threw us back upon each other as of yore. We found ourselves alone one
day in my house--where nothing ever used to happen, and she offered me
her lips, irresistibly. The appeal of her sensuality was answered by
mine, then, and often later. But the pleasure constantly restored,
which impelled me towards her, always ended in dismal enlightenments.
She remained a capricious and baffling egotist, and when I came away
from her house across the dark suburb among a host of beings vanishing,
like myself, I only brought away the memory of her nervous and
irritating laugh, and that new wrinkle which clung to her mouth like an
implement.

Then younger desires destroyed the old, and gallant adventures begot
one another. It is all over with this one and that one whom I adored.
When I see them again, I wonder that I can say, at one and the same
time, of a being who has not changed, "How I loved her!" and, "How I
have ceased to love her!"

All the while performing as a duty my daily task, all the while taking
suitable precautions so that Marie may not know and may not suffer, I
am looking for the happiness which lives. And truly, when I have a
sense of some new assent wavering and making ready, or when I am on the
way to a first rendezvous, I feel myself gloriously uplifted, and equal
to everything!

This fills my life. Desire wears the brain as much as thought wears