My grandmother’s passion for her husband faded away, illusion after illusion, in spite of the prodigious effort she made not to condemn my grandfather on the first proofs he gave of his sensual appetites, of his brutal way of enjoying life. Pierre’s strength was so great that in all physical exercises, hunting, and fishing he wore out the most intrepid; his love for excitement was so artless, his gaiety so exuberant that people overlooked the sensual self-indulgence of his temperament, his excesses even, when they would not have pardoned them in others.
But little by little they wearied of all this at his home, while his friends could not have enough of him. His wife saw him depart at dawn and not return until far into the night without regret. He was never late for meals, about which great care had to be taken for him.
“It is elementary politeness,” he would say, drawing out his lisping accent on the word “elementary,” “not to leave the companion of one’s home, if not of one’s life, alone at table.”
III
THE MARRIAGE OF MY FATHER AND MOTHER
A DAUGHTER, Olympe, was born to them after the German woman’s departure; her mother nursed her, brought her up with loving care, and you may be sure that the imaginative Pélagie dreamed at an early hour of the possible romance of the future marriage of her only child.
Unfortunately Olympe distressed her by the fantastical turn of her mind. She took great interest from her earliest age in the details of housekeeping, was troublesome, humdrum even, said her mother.
She disliked to read, was much annoyed at her father’s absence from home, whose motives she loudly incriminated. Urged to this by the servants’ stories, she quarrelled with him, bitterly reproached her mother for the number of books she read; and she introduced into the home, where the careless indifference of one member, the resignation of the other, might have brought about peace, an agitation which fed the constant disputes.
However, the husband and wife, so much disunited, were proud of their daughter’s beauty. Her father would often say: “She deserves a prince,” while her mother would reply: “A shepherd would please her better.”
Nothing foretold that this admirable statue would be animated some day. Olympe was fifteen years old, and in her family the marriage bells had always rung at that age. Olympe’s parents were humiliated at the thought that no one had as yet asked for their daughter’s hand.