lence. Her obedience is a
speculation; her complaisance is a hope; her devotion to you is a sort
of vocation, of which you reap the advantage; and her silence is
generosity. She will remain the victim of your caprices so long as she
does not understand them; she will suffer from the limitations of your
character until she has studied it; she will sacrifice herself without
love, because she believed in the show of passion you made at the
first moment of possession; she will no longer be silent when once she
has learned the uselessness of her sacrifices.

And then the morning arrives when the inconsistencies which have
prevailed in this union rise up like branches of a tree bent down for
a moment under a weight which has been gradually lightened. You have
mistaken for love the negative attitude of a young girl who was
waiting for happiness, who flew in advance of your desires, in the
hope that you would go forward in anticipation of hers, and who did
not dare to complain of the secret unhappiness, for which she at first
accused herself. What man could fail to be the dupe of a delusion
prepared at such long range, and in which a young innocent woman is at
once the accomplice and the victim? Unless you were a divine being it
would be impossible for you to escape the fascination with which
nature and society have surrounded you. Is not a snare set in
everything which surrounds you on the outside and influences you
within? For in order to be happy, is it not necessary to control the
impetuous desires of your senses? Where is the powerful barrier to
restrain her, raised by the light hand of a woman whom you wish to
please, because you do not possess? Moreover, you have caused your
troops to parade and march by, when there was no one at the window;
you have discharged your fireworks whose framework alone was left,
when your guest arrived to see them. Your wife, before the pledges of
marriage, was like a Mohican at the Opera: the teacher becomes
listless, when the savage begins to understand.

LVI.
In married life, the moment when two hearts come to understand each
other is sudden as a flash of lightning, and never returns, when once
it is passed.

This first entrance into life of two persons, during which a woman is
encouraged by the hope of happiness, by the still fresh sentiment of
her married duty, by the wish to please, by the sense of virtue which
begins to be so attractive as