Was I really never insane, never ill, no degenerate? Was I merely fooled by a trickster whom I worshipped, whose little embroidery scissors had cut off Samson's locks when he laid his weary head on the pillow, worn out by heavy toil, exhausted by care and anxiety on her account and the children's? Trustful, unsuspicious, I had lost my honour, my manhood, the will to live, my intellect, my five senses, and alas! much more even, in this ten years' sleep in the arms of the sorceress.
Was it possible—the thought filled me with shame—that a crime had been committed in these fogs in which I had lived for years like a phantom? An unconscious little crime, caused by a vague desire for power, by a woman's secret wish to get the better of the man in the duel called matrimony?
Doubtless I had been a fool! Seduced by a married woman; compelled to marry her to save her honour and her theatrical career; married under the dotal system and the condition that each should contribute half of the expenses, I was ruined after ten years, plundered, for I had borne the financial burden on my own shoulders entirely.
At this very moment when my wife denounced me as a spendthrift, incapable of providing the necessities of life; when she represented me as the squanderer of her so-called fortune; at this very moment she owed me forty thousand crowns, her share of the expenses, according to the verbal agreement made on our wedding day.
She was my debtor!
Determined to settle all accounts once and for ever, I jumped out of bed like a man who has dreamed that he is paralysed, and on awakening flings away the crutches with which he had walked in his dream. I dressed quickly and ran down-stairs to confront my wife.
Through the half-open door my enraptured gaze met a charming spectacle.
She lay, stretched out at full length, on her tumbled bed, her lovely little head buried in the pillow over which the flood of her golden hair waved and curled; her transparent nightgown had slipped off her shoulders, and her virginal bosom gleamed white under the lace insertion; the soft, red-and-white striped coverlet betrayed the swelling curves of her graceful, fragile body, leaving her bare feet uncovered—tiny arched feet with rosy toes and transparent flawless nails—a genuine work of art, perfect, fashioned in flesh after the model of an antique marble statue: and this was my wife.
Light-hearted and smiling, with an expression of chaste motherliness, she watched her three little ones as they were climbing and tumbling about among the flowered down pillows, as if on a heap of newly mown flowers.
The delightful spectacle softened me. But a whispering doubt in my heart warned me: "Beware of the she-panther playing with her cubs!"