Holy matrimony was degraded to legal prostitution.
She carefully treasured up all my admissions, and worked them into a legend which the papers greedily snapped up later on, and which was assiduously spread by all those of her friends whom I had turned out, one after the other.
My ruin had become an obsession with her. At the end of the year I found that I had given her twelve thousand crowns for household expenses, and I was compelled to ask my publishers for a sum in advance.
Whenever I reproached her with her extravagance, she invariably replied—
"Well, why have children and make your wife miserable? When I consider that I gave up a splendid position to marry you...."
But I had an answer to that taunt—
"As Baroness, my dear, your husband gave you three thousand crowns and debts. I give you three times as much, more than three times as much."
She said nothing, but she turned her back upon me, and in the evening I admitted all her charges; I agreed that three thousand is three times as much as ten thousand that I was a blackguard, a miser, a "bel ami," who had risen at the expense of his adored wife, adored more especially in her nightgown.
She poured all her venom into the first chapter of a novel, the subject of which was the exploitation of an oppressed wife by a criminal husband. Through my writings, on the other hand, always glided the white wraith of a lovely golden-haired woman, a madonna, a young mother. I was for ever chanting her praises, creating a glorious myth round the figure of the wondrous woman who by God's grace had been sent to brighten the thorny path of a poet....
And the critics never tired of lauding the "good genius" of a pessimistic novelist, of pouring on her full measures of entirely undeserved praise....