"Then I get angry with myself. I desire to leave the room, to leave them
alone, and I do, in fact, go out; but scarcely am I outside when I am
invaded by a fear of what is taking place within my absence. I go in
again, inventing some pretext. Or sometimes I do not go in; I remain
near the door, and listen. How can she humiliate herself and humiliate
me by placing me in this cowardly situation of suspicion and espionage?
Oh, abomination! Oh, the wicked animal! And he too, what does he think
of you? But he is like all men. He is what I was before my marriage. It
gives him pleasure. He even smiles when he looks at me, as much as to
say: 'What have you to do with this? It is my turn now.'

"This feeling is horrible. Its burn is unendurable. To entertain this
feeling toward any one, to once suspect a man of lusting after my wife,
was enough to spoil this man forever in my eyes, as if he had been
sprinkled with vitriol. Let me once become jealous of a being, and
nevermore could I re-establish with him simple human relations, and my
eyes flashed when I looked at him.

"As for my wife, so many times had I enveloped her with this moral
vitriol, with this jealous hatred, that she was degraded thereby. In the
periods of this causeless hatred I gradually uncrowned her. I covered
her with shame in my imagination.

"I invented impossible knaveries. I suspected, I am ashamed to say, that
she, this queen of 'The Thousand and One Nights,' deceived me with my
serf, under my very eyes, and laughing at me.

"Thus, with each new access of jealousy (I speak always of causeless
jealousy), I entered into the furrow dug formerly by my filthy