Fortune was smiling at us with a tear in the eye....
The banns were published. I packed my belongings and said good-bye to my attic, the witness of many joys and sorrows. I marched into that prison which all fear, but which, perhaps, we had less cause to dread than others, since we had foreseen all dangers, removed all stumbling blocks.... And yet....
[PART III]
I
What inexpressible happiness it is to be married! To be always near the beloved one, safe from the prying eyes of the fatuous world. It is as if one had regained the home of one's childhood with its sheltering love, a safe port after the storm, a nest which awaits the little ones.
Surrounded by nothing but objects which belonged to her, mementoes and relics of her parents' house, I felt as if I were a shoot grafted on her trunk; the oil paintings of her ancestors deluded me into thinking that I had been adopted by her family, because her ancestors will also be the ancestors of my children. I received everything from her hand; she made me wear her father's watch and chain; my dinner was served on her mother's china; she poured on me a continuous stream of trifling presents, relics of old times, which had belonged to famous warriors celebrated by the poets of her country, a fact which impressed me not a little. She was the benefactress, the generous giver of all these gifts, and I entirely forgot that it was I who had reclaimed her, lifted her out of the mire, made her the wife of a man with brilliant prospects; forgot that she had been an unknown actress, a divorced wife condemned by her sisters, a woman whom very probably I had saved from the worst.
What a happy life we led! We realised the dream of freedom in marriage. No double-bed, no common bed-room, room, no common dressing-room; nothing unseemly degraded the sanctity of our union. Marriage as we understood and realised it was a splendid institution. The tender good-nights, repeated again and again; the joy of wishing each other good-morning, of asking how we had slept, were they not due to the fact that we occupied separate rooms? How delightful were the stolen visits to each other, the courtesy and tenderness which we never forgot! How different compared with the brazen boldness, the more or less graciously endured brutalities which are as a rule inseparable from matrimony.
I got through an amazing amount of work, staying at home by the side of my beloved wife who was sewing tiny garments for the expected baby. What a lot of time I had wasted in rendezvous and idleness in the days gone by!