become your companion, ready to attach myself to you, to forget your
coercive and threatening proceedings, in order that I might only remember
that I ought to be a devoted wife and to love you as much as it might be
possible for me to love you, you became jealous, you, as no man has ever
been before, with the base, ignoble jealousy of a spy, which was as
degrading to you as it was to me. I had not been married eight months
when you suspected me of every perfidiousness, and you even told me so.
What a disgrace! And as you could not prevent me from being beautiful and
from pleasing people, from being called in drawing-rooms and also in the
newspapers one of the most beautiful women in Paris, you tried everything
you could think of to keep admirers from me, and you hit upon the
abominable idea of making me spend my life in a constant state of
motherhood, until the time should come when I should disgust every man.
Oh, do not deny it. I did not understand it for some time, but then I
guessed it. You even boasted about it to your sister, who told me of it,
for she is fond of me and was disgusted at your boorish coarseness.

"Ah! Remember how you have behaved in the past! How for eleven years you
have compelled me to give up all society and simply be a mother to your
children. And then you would grow disgusted with me and I was sent into
the country, the family chateau, among fields and meadows. And when I
reappeared, fresh, pretty and unspoiled, still seductive and constantly
surrounded by admirers, hoping that at last I should live a little more
like a rich young society woman, you were seized with jealousy again, and
you began once more to persecute me with that infamous and hateful desire
from which you are suffering at this moment by my side. And it is not the
desire of possessing me--for I should never have refused myself to
you, but it is the wish to make me unsightly.

"And then that abominable and mysterious thing occurred which I was a