all the faculties of this child, loved as a child, entirely
unemployed; I had perhaps wearied her with my love before the hour of
loving had struck for her! Too young to understand that in the
constancy of the wife lies the germ of the mother's devotion, she
mistook this first test of marriage for life itself, and the
refractory child cursed life, unknown to me, nor daring to complain to
me, out of sheer modesty perhaps! In so cruel a position she would be
defenceless against any man who stirred her deeply.--And I, so wise a
judge as they say--I, who have a kind heart, but whose mind was
absorbed--I understood too late these unwritten laws of the woman's
code, I read them by the light of the fire that wrecked my roof. Then
I constituted my heart a tribunal by virtue of the law, for the law
makes the husband a judge: I acquitted my wife, and I condemned
myself. But love took possession of me as a passion, the mean,
despotic passion which comes over some old men. At this day I love the
absent Honorine as a man of sixty loves a woman whom he must possess
at any cost, and yet I feel the strength of a young man. I have the
insolence of the old man and the reserve of a boy.--My dear fellow,
society only laughs at such a desperate conjugal predicament. Where it
pities a lover, it regards a husband as ridiculously inept; it makes
sport of those who cannot keep the woman they have secured under the
canopy of the Church, and before the Maire's scarf of office. And I
had to keep silence.

"'Serizy is happy. His indulgence allows him to see his wife; he can
protect and defend her; and, as he adores her, he knows all the
perfect joys of a benefactor whom nothing can disturb, not even
ridicule, for he pours it himself on his fatherly pleasures. "I remain
married only for my wife's sake," he said to me one day on coming out
of court.