ith so many others, this thought, like a pebble flung into the
bosom of a lake, was lost in the abyss of his tumultuous thoughts.
Nevertheless, in spite of himself the author was compelled to
investigate, and eventually there was gathered within his mind, little
by little, a swarm of conclusions, more or less just, on the subject of
married life. Works like the present one are formed in the mind of the
author with as much mystery as that with which truffles grow on the
scented plains of Perigord. Out of the primitive and holy horror which
adultery caused him and the investigation which he had thoughtlessly
made, there was born one morning a trifling thought in which his ideas
were formulated. This thought was really a satire upon marriage. It was
as follows: A husband and wife found themselves in love with each other
for the first time after twenty-seven years of marriage.

He amused himself with this little axiom and passed a whole week in
delight, grouping around this harmless epigram the crowd of ideas which
came to him unconsciously and which he was astonished to find that he
possessed. His humorous mood yielded at last to the claims of serious
investigation. Willing as he was to take a hint, the author returned to
his habitual idleness. Nevertheless, this slight germ of science and
of joke grew to perfection, unfostered, in the fields of thought. Each
phase of the work which had been condemned by others took root and
gathered strength, surviving like the slight branch of a tree which,
flung upon the sand by a winter's storm, finds itself covered at morning
with white and fantastic icicles, produced by the caprices of nightly
frosts. So the sketch lived on and became the starting point of myriad
branching moralizations. It was like a polypus which multiplies itself
by generation. The feelings of youth, the observations which a favorable
opportunity led him to make, were verified in the most trifling events
of his after life. Soon this mass of ideas became harmonized, took life,
seemed, as it were, to become a living individual and moved in the midst
of those domains of fancy, where the soul loves to give full rein to its
wild creations. Amid all the distractions of the world and of life, the
author always heard a voice ringing in his ears and mockingly revealing
the secrets of things at the very moment he was watching a woman as she
danced, smiled, or talked. Just as Mephistopheles pointed out to Faust
in that terrif