She thought, sometimes, that, after all, this was the happiest time

of her life--the honeymoon, as people called it. To taste the full

sweetness of it, it would have been necessary doubtless to fly to those

lands with sonorous names where the days after marriage are full of

laziness most suave. In post chaises behind blue silken curtains to ride

slowly up steep road, listening to the song of the postilion re-echoed

by the mountains, along with the bells of goats and the muffled sound of

a waterfall; at sunset on the shores of gulfs to breathe in the perfume

of lemon trees; then in the evening on the villa-terraces above, hand in

hand to look at the stars, making plans for the future. It seemed to her

that certain places on earth must bring happiness, as a plant peculiar

to the soil, and that cannot thrive elsewhere. Why could not she lean

over balconies in Swiss chalets, or enshrine her melancholy in a Scotch

cottage, with a husband dressed in a black velvet coat with long tails,

and thin shoes, a pointed hat and frills? Perhaps she would have liked

to confide all these things to someone. But how tell an undefinable

uneasiness, variable as the clouds, unstable as the winds? Words failed

her--the opportunity, the courage.

If Charles had but wished it, if he had guessed it, if his look had but

once met her thought, it seemed to her that a sudden plenty would have

gone out from her heart, as the fruit falls from a tree when shaken by

a hand. But as the intimacy of their life became deeper, the greater

became the gulf that separated her from him.

Charles's conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and

everyone's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without

exciting emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity,

he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors

from Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day

he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come

across in a novel.

A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold

activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements

of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing,

wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm,

this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him.

Sometimes she would draw; and it was great amusement to Charles to stand

there bolt upright and watch her bend over her cardboard, with eyes

half-closed the better to see her work, or rolling, between her fingers,

little bread-pellets. As to the piano, the more quickly her fingers

glided over it the more he wondered. She struck the notes with aplomb,

and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken

up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the

other end of the village when the window was open, and often the

bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad bare-headed and in list

slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.




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