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 I saw 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 I remembered 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, I dream 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 I delighted 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 inep