"We no longer belong to ourselves. We are no longer beings, but things.
We stand first in their self-esteem, last in their esteem. We have women
who call themselves our friends, but they are friends like Prudence,
women who were once kept and who have still the costly tastes that their
age does not allow them to gratify. Then they become our friends, or
rather our guests at table. Their friendship is carried to the point of
servility, never to that of disinterestedness. Never do they give you
advice which is not lucrative. It means little enough to them that we
should have ten lovers extra, as long as they get dresses or a bracelet
out of them, and that they can drive in our carriage from time to time
or come to our box at the theatre. They have our last night's bouquets,
and they borrow our shawls. They never render us a service, however
slight, without seeing that they are paid twice its value. You yourself
saw when Prudence brought me the six thousand francs that I had asked
her to get from the duke, how she borrowed five hundred francs, which
she will never pay me back, or which she will pay me in hats, which will
never be taken out of their boxes.
"We can not, then, have, or rather I can not have more than one possible
kind of happiness, and this is, sad as I sometimes am, suffering as I
always am, to find a man superior enough not to ask questions about my
life, and to be the lover of my impressions rather than of my body.
Such a man I found in the duke; but the duke is old, and old age neither
protects nor consoles. I thought I could accept the life which he
offered me; but what would you have? I was dying of ennui, and if one is
bound to be consumed, it is as well to throw oneself into the flames as
to be asphyxiated with charcoal.
"Then I met you, young, ardent, happy, and I tried to make you the man I
had longed for in my noisy solitude. What I loved in you was not the
man who was, but the man who was going to be. You do not accept the
position, you reject it as unworthy of you; you are an ordinary lover.
Do like the others; pay me, and say no more about it."
Marguerite, tired out with this long confession, threw herself back on
the sofa, and to stifle a slight cough put up her handkerchief to her
lips, and from that to her eyes.