ate, and that this first quarrel would
soon be drowned under a new flood of the intensest sensuality. I thought
that we had disputed with each other, and had become reconciled, and
that it would not happen again. But in this same honeymoon there came a
period of satiety, in which we ceased to be necessary to each other, and
a new quarrel broke out.

"It became evident that the first was not a matter of chance. 'It was
inevitable,' I thought. This second quarrel stupefied me the more,
because it was based on an extremely unjust cause. It was something like
a question of money,--and never had I haggled on that score; it was even
impossible that I should do so in relation to her. I only remember that,
in answer to some remark that I made, she insinuated that it was my
intention to rule her by means of money, and that it was upon money
that I based my sole right over her. In short, something extraordinarily
stupid and base, which was neither in my character nor in hers.

"I was beside myself. I accused her of indelicacy. She made the same
accusation against me, and the dispute broke out. In her words, in the
expression of her face, of her eyes, I noticed again the hatred that
had so astonished me before. With a brother, friends, my father, I had
occasionally quarrelled, but never had there been between us this fierce
spite. Some time passed. Our mutual hatred was again concealed beneath
an access of sensual desire, and I again consoled myself with the
reflection that these scenes were reparable faults.

"But when they were repeated a third and a fourth time, I understood
that they were not simply faults, but a fatality that must happen again.
I was no longer frightened, I was simply astonished that I should be
precisely the one to live so uncomfortably with my wife, and that the
same thing did not happen in other households. I did not know that in
all households the same sudden changes take place, but that all,
like myself, imagine that it is a misfortune exclusively reserved for
themselves alone, which they carefully conceal as shameful, not only to
others, but to themselves, like a bad disease.

"That was what happened to me. Begun in the early days, it continued and
increased with characteristics of fury that were ever more pronounced.
At the bottom of my soul, from the first weeks, I felt that I was in a
trap, that I had what I did not expect, and that marriage is not a joy,
but a painful trial. Like everybody else,