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These discords, these difficulties that come between two people when one aspires only to success and the attractions of fashionable life, while the other keeps intact her native and religious sensibility, do not necessarily prevent that kind of understanding which is possible in our flexible modern life to people of fortune. So many husbands and wives, for instance, if they should stop to think, would be surprised by the amount of their incompatibilities. They are content with approximate congeniality, in willing ignorance. But one cannot lay bare the roots of a tree and have it grow and live. The denial of its proper nourishment does not kill it at once: for a short time it may continue to blossom and to flower. At last, however, it falls before some severe storm, like a disabled ship which breasts the gale as long as possible and in the end surrenders to the elements. So I laid bare the roots of our love; little by little, I deprived it of its necessary protection, and finally crushed it utterly by one severe blow.
These apparently trifling details, which I have enumerated, before coming exactly to the real outbreak, by degrees alienated Raymonde from me. It was indeed a gradual uprooting. So completely given up to this imperious desire to shine that I was intolerant of any encroachments upon it by the intimacies of our life together, entirely subordinated to that state of mind in which one seeks applause, I turned more and more from Raymonde and her influence, which I thought narrow and old-fashioned.
She went with me uncomplainingly, wherever I suggested. I imposed on her immodest spectacles and degrading associates, such as our society supports, when she did not desire them: still she was not what I wanted to make her, a woman of the world.
It was not in her. A stirring conflict was waged within her, between her love for me and her upright nature, incapable of bending itself to the manners of our day. I helped to create the problem, but did not attempt to aid her in its solution. Her struggle even began to undermine her health, though she showed no outward trace of the exhaustion she felt, excepting perhaps a loss of weight. But thinness was very fashionable at this time! Ah! those people whose daily acts are regulated by a definite code of morals, to whom faith and love are as necessary as food and respiration—they have a presentiment of death when once that faith is shaken; they have no powers of resistance when their ideals are finally shattered.
The first effect in Raymonde was a loss of cheerfulness. I did not notice it then, yet I recall it clearly now. There is in our past always something which we would forget, but which does not permit itself to be forgotten. There was a time when her laughter was spontaneous, with her little girl, in carelessness and innocence of heart. When she held her child upon her knee, and lavished her enticement on her, she resembled those madonnas which have altogether the air of elder sisters. Little by little this clear, charming laughter became less frequent, diminished, was shattered! Even Dilette perceived it. And I did not fail to notice that the poor little one missed, as she might her broken or lost toys, these tokens of joyousness.
Raymonde enjoyed only the simple pleasures of life, of which I had none to offer her. Into the simplest of them I had injected, like a secret passion, this perverse desire for sensation, filling with astonishment, torment and pained shame, a heart simple and ingenuous, ignorant of the intricacy of our life.
The expression which I had seen in her face on that first day in May, when I met her in the wood and when my unexpected presence made her retrace her road, or when I had made my avowal of love at the chateau, or on the evening of one of our last walks before the birth of our child, this look of fear,—here, I saw it again, like a ghost, upon her face. But I attached no importance to it.
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She told me once later, that during all this time she was trying to conform to my tastes, she never paid one of those visits to which I attached such importance, without reciting a little prayer to God, on the staircase or in the ante-chamber, for courage. And it was the same thing when we received. It was absolute torture for her to endure the custom of kissing the hand which had recently come again into vogue. Her arms hung at her sides and one had always to search for her hand there. She never submitted without a shudder, which, though she did her best to suppress it, she never entirely succeeded in concealing—above all, at home, when she wore no gloves.