no reason why money should destroy one's sentiments, and the fact that
Aurore had money was not likely to prevent Casimir from appreciating
the charms of a pretty girl. It seems, therefore, very probable that he
loved his young wife, at any rate as much as this Casimir was capable of
loving his wife.

The next question is whether she loved him. It has been said that she
did, simply because she declared that she did not. When, later on, after
her separation, she spoke of her marriage, all her later grievances were
probably in her mind. There are her earlier letters, though, which some
people consider a proof that she cared for Casimir, and there are also a
few words jotted down in her notebook. When her husband was absent, she
was anxious about him and feared that he had met with an accident.
It would be strange indeed if a girl of eighteen did not feel some
affection for the man who had been the first to make love to her, a man
whom she had married of her own free-will. It is rare for a woman to
feel no kind of attachment for her husband, but is that attachment love?
When a young wife complains of her husband, we hear in her reproaches
the protest of her offended dignity, of her humbled pride. When a woman
loves her husband, though, she does not reproach him, guilty though he
may be, with having humiliated and wounded her. What she has against him
then, is that he has broken her heart by his lack of love for her. This
note and this accent can never be mistaken, and never once do we find
it with Aurore. We may therefore conclude that she had never loved her
husband.

Casimir did not know how to win her affection. He did not even realize
that he needed to win it. He was very much like all men. The idea never
occurs to them that, when once they are married, they have to win their
wife.