She replied:
"There's nothing to be done. It is better not to think of it."
He felt that he hated her: then he was struck by the grotesqueness of her reply: and he laughed. He thought it would be well if Anna could give him her recipe for avoiding the thought of sad things, and that life must be very easy for those who are lucky enough to have no heart. He fancied that if Braun were to die, Anna would hardly be put out by it, and he felt glad that he was not married. His solitude seemed less sad to him than the fetters of habit that bind a man for life to a creature to whom he may be an object of hatred, or worse still, nothing at all. It was very certain that this woman loved no one. She hardly existed. The atmosphere of piety had withered her.
She took Christophe by surprise one day at the end of October.—They were at dinner. He was talking to Braun about a crime of passion which was the sole topic in the town. In the country two Italian girls, sisters, had fallen in love with the same man. They were both unable to make the sacrifice with a good grace, and so they had drawn lots as to who should yield. But when the lot was cast the girl who had lost showed little inclination to abide by the decision. The other was enraged by such faithlessness. From insult they came to blows, and even to fighting with knives: then, suddenly, the wind changed: they kissed each other, and wept, and vowed that they could not live without each other: and, as they could not submit to sharing the lover, they made up their minds that he should be killed. This they did. One night the two girls invited the lover to their room, and he was congratulating himself upon such twofold favor; and, while one girl clasped him passionately in her arms, the other no less passionately stabbed him in the back. It chanced that his cries were heard. People came and tore him in a pitiable condition from the embraces of his charmers, and they were arrested. They protested that it was no one's business, and that they alone were interested in the matter, and that, from the moment when they had agreed to rid themselves of their own property, it was no one else's concern. Their victim was not a little inclined to agree with their line of argument: but the law was unable to follow it. And Braun could not understand it either.
"They are mad," he said. "They should be shut up in an asylum. Beasts!… I can understand a man killing himself for love. I can even understand a man killing the woman he loves if she deceives him…. I don't mean that I would excuse his doing so: but I am prepared to admit that there is a remnant of primitive savagery in us: it is barbarous, but it is logical: you kill the person who makes you suffer. But for a woman to kill the man she loves, without bitterness, without hatred, simply because another woman loves him, is nothing but madness…. Can you understand it, Christophe?"
"Peuh!" said Christophe. "I'm quite used to being unable to understand things. Love is madness."
Anna, who had said nothing, and seemed not to be listening, said in her calm voice:
"There is nothing irrational in it. It is quite natural. When a woman loves, she wants to destroy the man she loves so that no one else may have him."
Braun looked at his wife aghast, thumped on the table, folded his arms, and said:
"Where on earth did you get that from?… What? So you must put your oar in, must you? What the devil do you know about it?"