How was it that she had never noticed anything, had never guessed this before? How was it that Julien's frequent absence from home, his renewed attention to his toilet, his better temper had told her nothing? Now she understood Gilberte's nervous irritability, her exaggerated affection for herself and the bliss in which she had appeared to be living lately, and which had so pleased the comte.
She pulled up her horse for she wanted to think calmly, and the quick movement confused her ideas. After the first shock she became almost indifferent; she felt neither jealousy nor hatred, only contempt. She did not think about Julien at all, for nothing that he could do would have astonished her, but the twofold treachery of the comtesse, who had deceived her friend as well as her husband, hurt her deeply. So everyone was treacherous, and untrue and faithless! Her eyes filled with tears, for sometimes it is as bitter to see an illusion destroyed as to witness the death of a friend. She resolved to say nothing more about her discovery. Her heart would be dead to everyone but Paul and her parents, but she would bear a smiling face.
When she reached home she caught up her son in her arms, carried him to her room and pressed her lips to his face again and again, and for a whole hour she played with and caressed him.
Julien came in to dinner in a very good temper and full of plans for his wife's pleasure.
"Won't your father and mother come and stay with us this year?" he said.
Jeanne almost forgave him his infidelity, so grateful was she to him for making this proposal. She longed to see the two people she loved best after Paul, and she passed the whole evening in writing to them, and urging them to come as soon as possible.
They wrote to say they would come on the twentieth of May; it was then the seventh, and Jeanne awaited their arrival with intense impatience. Besides her natural desire to see her parents, she felt it would be such a relief to have near her two honest hearts, two simple-minded beings whose life and every action, thought and desire had always been upright and pure. She felt she stood alone in her honesty among all this guilt. She had learnt to dissimulate her feelings, to meet the comtesse with an outstretched hand and a smiling face, but her sense of desolation increased with her contempt for her fellow-men.
Every day some village scandal reached her ears which filled her with still greater disgust and scorn for human frailty. The Couillards' daughter had just had a child and was therefore going to be married. The Martins' servant, who was an orphan, a little girl only fifteen years old, who lived near, and a widow, a lame, poverty-stricken woman who was so horribly dirty that she had been nicknamed La Crotte, were all pregnant; and Jeanne was continually hearing of the misconduct of some girl, some married woman with a family, or of some rich farmer who had been held in general respect.
This warm spring seemed to revive the passions of mankind as it revived the plants and the flowers; but to Jeanne, whose senses were dead, and whose wounded heart and romantic soul were alone stirred by the warm springtide breezes, and who only dreamed of the poetic side of love, these bestial desires were revolting and hateful. She was angry with Gilberte, not for having robbed her of her husband, but for having bespattered herself with this filth. The comtesse was not of the same class as the peasants, who could not resist their brutal desires; then how could she have fallen into the same abomination?
The very day that her parents were to arrive, Julien increased his wife's disgust by telling her laughingly, as though it were something quite natural and very funny, that the baker having heard a noise in his oven the day before, which was not baking day, had gone to see what it was, and instead of finding the stray cat he expected to see, had surprised his wife, "who was certainly not putting bread into the oven." "The baker closed the mouth of the oven," went on Julien, "and they would have been suffocated if the baker's little boy, who had seen his mother go into the oven with the blacksmith, had not told the neighbors what was going on." He laughed as he added, "That will give a nice flavor to the bread. It is just like a tale of La Fontaine's."