s with the reflected lustre of her husband's
fame, and to find other women envious of her, was to Augustine a new
harvest of pleasures; but it was the last gleam of conjugal happiness.
She first wounded her husband's vanity when, in spite of vain efforts,
she betrayed her ignorance, the inelegance of her language, and the
narrowness of her ideas. Sommervieux's nature, subjugated for nearly two
years and a half by the first transports of love, now, in the calm of
less new possession, recovered its bent and habits, for a while diverted
from their channel. Poetry, painting, and the subtle joys of imagination
have inalienable rights over a lofty spirit. These cravings of a
powerful soul had not been starved in Theodore during these two years;
they had only found fresh pasture. As soon as the meadows of love had
been ransacked, and the artist had gathered roses and cornflowers as the
children do, so greedily that he did not see that his hands could
hold no more, the scene changed. When the painter showed his wife the
sketches for his finest compositions he heard her exclaim, as her father
had done, "How pretty!" This tepid admiration was not the outcome of
conscientious feeling, but of her faith on the strength of love.

Augustine cared more for a look than for the finest picture. The only
sublime she knew was that of the heart. At last Theodore could not
resist the evidence of the cruel fact--his wife was insensible to
poetry, she did not dwell in his sphere, she could not follow him in
all his vagaries, his inventions, his joys and his sorrows; she walked
groveling in the world of reality, while his head was in the skies.
Common minds cannot appreciate the perennial sufferings of a being
who, while bound to another by the most intimate affections, is obliged
constantly to suppress the dearest flights of his soul, and to thrust
down into the void those images which a magic power compels him to
create. To him the torture is all the more intolerable because his
feeling towards his companion enjoins, as its first law, that they
should have no concealments, but mingle the aspirations of their thought
as perfectly as the effusions of their soul. The demands of nature are
not to be cheated. She is as inexorable as necessity, which is, indeed,
a sort of social nature. Sommervieux took refuge in the peace and
silence of his studio, hoping that the habit of living with artists
might mould his wife and develop in her the dormant germs