goodness of God. Better, indeed, would it be for him who possesses and
who loses it, never to have known it.

The Marquis de Ganges was the first to weary of this happy life. Little
by little he began to miss the pleasures of a young man; he began to draw
away from the marquise and to draw nearer to his former friends. On her
part, the marquise, who for the sake of wedded intimacy had sacrificed
her habits of social life, threw herself into society, where new triumphs
awaited her. These triumphs aroused the jealousy of the marquis; but he
was too much a man of his century to invite ridicule by any
manifestation; he shut his jealousy into his soul, and it emerged in a
different form on every different occasion. To words of love, so sweet
that they seemed the speech of angels, succeeded those bitter and biting
utterances that foretell approaching division. Before long, the marquis
and the marquise only saw each other at hours when they could not avoid
meeting; then, on the pretext of necessary journeys, and presently
without any pretext at all, the marquis would go away for three-quarters
of a year, and once more the marquise found herself widowed. Whatever
contemporary account one may consult, one finds them all agreeing to
declare that she was always the same--that is to say, full of patience,
calmness, and becoming behaviour--and it is rare to find such a unanimity
of opinion about a young and beautiful woman.

About this time the marquis, finding it unendurable to be alone with his
wife during the short spaces of time which he spent at home, invited his
two brothers, the chevalier and the abbe de Ganges, to come and live with
him. He had a third brother, who, as the second son, bore the title of
comte, and who was colonel of the Languedoc regiment, but as this
gentleman played no part in this story we shall not concern ourselves
with him.