"'It was eighteen months after my father's death--my mother followed him to the tomb in a few months--when the fearful night came which surprised me by Honorine's farewell letter.What poetic delusion had seduced my wife?Was it through her senses?Was it the magnetism of misfortune or of genius?Which of these powers had taken her by storm or misled her?--I would not know.The blow was so terrible,that for a month I remained stunned.Afterwards,reflection counseled me to continue in ignorance,and Honorine's misfortunes have since taught me too much about all these things.--So far,Maurice,the story is commonplace enough;but one word will change it all:I love Honorine,I have never ceased to worship her.From the day when she left me Ihave lived on memory;one by one I recall the pleasures for which Honorine no doubt had no taste.
"'Oh!'said he,seeing the amazement in my eyes,'do not make a hero of me,do not think me such a fool,as the Colonel of the Empire would say,as to have sought no diversion.Alas,my boy!I was either too young or too much in love;I have not in the whole world met with another woman.After frightful struggles with myself,I tried to forget;money in hand,I stood on the very threshold of infidelity,but there the memory of Honorine rose before me like a white statue.
As I recalled the infinite delicacy of that exquisite skin,through which the blood might be seen coursing and the nerves quivering;as Isaw in fancy that ingenuous face,as guileless on the eve of my sorrows as on the day when I said to her,"Shall we marry?"as Iremembered a heavenly fragrance,the very odor of virtue,and the light in her eyes,the prettiness of her movements,I fled like a man preparing to violate a tomb,who sees emerging from it the transfigured soul of the dead.At consultations,in Court,by night,Idream so incessantly of Honorine that only by excessive strength of mind do I succeed in attending to what I am doing and saying.This is the secret of my labors.
"'Well,I felt no more anger with her than a father can feel on seeing his beloved child in some danger it has imprudently rushed into.I understood that I had made a poem of my wife--a poem Idelighted in with such intoxication,that I fancied she shared the intoxication.Ah!Maurice,an indiscriminating passion in a husband is a mistake that may lead to any crime in a wife.I had no doubt left 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 Ihad 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.
"'But I--I have nothing;I have not even to face ridicule,I who live solely on a love which is starving!I who can never find a word to say to a woman of the world!I who loathe prostitution!I who am faithful under a spell!--But for my religious faith,I should have killed myself.I have defied the gulf of hard work;I have thrown myself into it,and come out again alive,fevered,burning,bereft of sleep!----'
"I cannot remember all the words of this eloquent man,to whom passion gave an eloquence indeed so far above that of the pleader that,as Ilistened to him,I,like him,felt my cheeks wet with tears.You may conceive of my feelings when,after a pause,during which we dried them away,he finished his story with this revelation:--"'This is the drama of my soul,but it is not the actual living drama which is at this moment being acted in Paris!The interior drama interests nobody.I know it;and you will one day admit that it is so,you,who at this moment shed tears with me;no one can burden his heart or his skin with another's pain.The measure of our sufferings is in ourselves.--You even understand my sorrows only by very vague analogy.Could you see me calming the most violent frenzy of despair by the contemplation of a miniature in which I can see and kiss her brow,the smile on her lips,the shape of her face,can breathe the whiteness of her skin;which enables me almost to feel,to play with the black masses of her curling hair?--Could you see me when I leap with hope--when I writhe under the myriad darts of despair--when Itramp through the mire of Paris to quell my irritation by fatigue?Ihave fits of collapse comparable to those of a consumptive patient,moods of wild hilarity,terrors as of a murderer who meets a sergeant of police.In short,my life is a continual paroxysm of fears,joy,and dejection.
