Rude! One of her favourite catchwords! A man pays her attention, in other words makes advances to her, and she listens politely, for fear of being rude. What a woman!
But fate was against me. I was lying at her feet, her beautiful little feet, encased in tiny shoes. She was wearing black silk stockings, which added to my confusion; her leg was a little fuller than it had been; the black legs in a cloud of petticoats were the legs of a she-devil.
Her constant fear of motherhood irritated me; I lied to her; I told her that she had nothing to fear from me; that I knew how to cheat nature. I repeated my assurances until I finished by believing in them myself, and in the end succeeded in setting her mind at ease by promising to be responsible for all consequences.
She was living with her mother and aunt in the second story of a house in one of the main thoroughfares. As she threatened to visit me in my own room if they prevented me from seeing her, I was allowed to call. But the thought of the supervision of these two old women, whom I knew to be watching us through the keyhole all the time, was almost beyond bearing.
The divorced husband and wife were beginning to realise how much they had lost. The Baroness, once a respected married woman, mistress of an aristocratic establishment, had returned to the conditions of her childhood. She was under the control of her mother, almost a prisoner in one room, kept by two old women, who were themselves in needy circumstances. The mother never lost an opportunity of reminding her of her careful bringing up and how she had been fitted to take an honourable social position, and the daughter remembered the happy days following her release from the parental yoke. Bitter words were spoken on both sides, tears and insults were all too frequent, and I had to pay for them when I called in the evening ... to visit a prisoner under the eyes of a warder and witness.
When the strain of these painful meetings became unbearable, we ventured to meet two or three times in the park. But we only jumped from the frying-pan into the fire, for now we were exposed to the contemptuous stare of the crowd. We hated the spring sunshine which illuminated our misery. We missed the darkness, we longed for the winter, which made it easier for us to hide our shame. Alas! the summer was coming with its long nights, which know no darkness.
Our former friends dropped us, one after the other. Even my sister, intimidated by the now universal gossip, grew suspicious and estranged when the ex-baroness, at a little supper party, tried to keep up her spirits by taking too much wine, became intoxicated, proposed a toast, smoked cigarettes, and generally behaved in a way which excited the disgust of the women and the contempt of the men.
"That woman's a common prostitute!" said a respectable married man and father of a family to my brother-in-law, and the latter took the first chance to repeat the remark to me.
When on the following Sunday evening we arrived at my sister's house, where we had been invited to supper, the servant informed us, to our consternation, that her master and mistress were out.
We spent the evening in my room, a prey to anger and despair, seeking comfort in the thought of suicide. I pulled down the blinds to shut out the daylight, and we sat together in misery, waiting for night and darkness, before we ventured out again into the street. But the summer sun did not set until late, and at eight o'clock we both felt hungry. Neither of us had any money, and there was nothing to eat or drink in the cupboard. These moments were some of the most wretched moments of my life, and gave me a foretaste of misery to come. Reproaches, cold kisses, floods of tears, remorse, disgust.