She said first that she was not married. Julien had feared this. To tell the truth, he had even been silently sure of it. But he had always hoped that the contrary would turn out to be the case, and that Annette should tell him this, that doubt should no longer be possible, filled him with consternation. Intensely Catholic at heart, under his superficial liberalism, he had not freed himself from the idea of sin. Instantly he thought of his mother: she would never accept it. He foresaw a struggle. He was very much in love. In spite of the grief that Annette's confession caused him, in spite of the real fall her past weakness signified for him, the "error" of her whom he loved, he loved her, he was ready, in order to have her, to fight against his mother's opposition. But someone must help him; Annette must second him. He was weak; to endure the combat, he needed to summon all his strength, not the least element of which was the strength of illusion. He needed to idealize Annette, and if Annette had been clever she would have helped him to do so.
She saw the grief which her words caused. She had expected it; she was sorry for it, but she could not spare him. Since they were to live together, each would have to take his share of the trials and even the errors of the other. But she did not suspect the conflict that was taking place in him; and if she had thought of it, she would have remained confident of the victory of love.
"My poor Julien," she said, "I am giving you pain. Forgive me. It is hard for me too. You believed that I was better than I am. You gave me a higher place, too high, in your mind. . . . I am a woman. I am weak. . . . At least, if I have made a mistake, I have never deceived anyone else. I have always acted in good faith. I have always done that."
"Yes," he said hastily. "I'm sure of it. He deceived you, didn't he?"
"Who?" asked Annette.
"That wretch. . . . Forgive me! . . . That man who left you."
"No, don't accuse him," she said. "I am the guilty one."
She attached to this word "guilty" only the sense of a warm regret for the pain she was causing him, but he seized upon it greedily. In his confusion he longed to hold fast to the idea that Annette was the victim of a seduction and that she had repented. . . . He had an extreme need of this notion of "repenting"; it was for him a kind of compensation for the hurt he had suffered, a balm for the wound it could not heal but could render endurable; it gave him a moral superiority over Annette of which—to be fair to him—he would never have made use. In short, since he had no doubt about Annette's sin, he also had none about the need of repentance. His Christian nature was imbued with both these ideas. The most liberal Christian never frees himself from them.
But Annette had sprung from a race with a different kind of soul. The Rivières might be pure or impure, in the sense that Christian morality attaches to this word; but if they were pure it was not in obedience to an invisible God or his too visible representatives and their Tables of the Law. It was because they loved purity as moral cleanliness, as beauty. And if they were impure they regarded it as an affair between themselves and their own consciences, not the consciences of others. Annette could not admit that she must give an account of herself to others. If she confessed herself to Julien, it was a gift of love that she was making him. In all honesty, she owed him merely an account of her life. But of her inner life she did not owe him any account. She gave it to him of her own free will. She saw now that Julien would have preferred to have her embellish the truth. But she was too proud to profit by a lying excuse of which she felt no need. On the contrary, when she understood what he wanted her to say she took pains to make it clear that she had given herself to her lover.
Julien, who was completely upset, would not listen to her.