ousewife, active and economical,
indeed very economical. According to Proudhon, a woman, nothing more. I
could have shaped my course accordingly; so many artists are in the same
plight! But this modest role was not enough for her.

Little by little, slyly, silently, she managed to get rid of all my
friends. We had not made any difference in our talk because of * her
presence. We talked as we always had done in the past, but she never
understood the irony or the fantasy of our artistic exaggerations, of
our wild axioms, or paradoxes, in which-an idea is travestied only to
figure more brilliantly. It only irritated and puzzled her. Seated in
a quiet corner of the drawing-room, she listened and said nothing,
planning all the while how she should eliminate one by one those who
so much shocked her. Notwithstanding the seeming friendliness of the
welcome, there could already be felt in my rooms that thin current
of cold air, which warns that the door is open and that it is time to
leave.

My friends once gone, she replaced them by her own. I found myself
surrounded by an absurd set of worthies, strangers to art, who hated
poetry and scorned it because "it made no money." On purpose the names
of fashionable writers who manufacture plays and novels by the dozen
were cited before me, with the remark: "So and so makes a great deal of
money!"

Make money! this is the all-important point for these creatures, and
I had the pain of seeing my wife think with them. In this fatal
atmosphere, her provincial habits, her mean and narrow views were made
still more odious by an incredible stinginess.

Fifteen thousand francs (six hundred pounds) a year! It seemed to me
that with this income we could live without fear of the morrow. Not
at all! She was always grumbling, talking of economy, reform, good
investments. As she overpowered me with these dull details, I felt all
desire and taste for work ebb away from me. Sometimes she came to
my table and scornfully turned over the scattered half-written
pages:--"Only that!" she would say, counting the hours lost upon the
insignificant little lines. Ah I if I had listened to her, my glorious
title of poet, which it has taken me so many years to win, would be now
dragged through the black mire of sensational literature. And when
I think that to this selfsame woman I had at first opened my heart,
confided all my dreams; and when I think that the contempt she now
shows me because I do not make mo