I almost envied those unfortunate wretches who had the right to be jealous, who had to fight against a woman’s coquettes and light behavior, and who had to defend their honor that was threatened by some poacher on the preserves of love.  They had a target to aim at; they knew their enemies and knew what they were doing, while I was wounding in a land of terrible mirages, was struggling in the midst of vague suppositions, and was causing my own troubles and was enraged with her past, which was, I felt sure, as white and pure as any bridal veil.

Ah!  It would be better to blow my brains out, I thought to myself, than to prolong such a situation!  I had had enough of it.  I scarcely lived, and I wished to know all that Elaine had done before we became engaged.  I wanted to know whether I was the first or the second, and I determined to know it, even if I had to sacrifice years of my life in inquiry, and to lower myself to compromising words and acts, and to every species of artifice and to spend everything that I possessed!

She might believe whatever she liked, for after all, I should only laugh at it.  We might have been so happy, and there were so many who envied me, and who would gladly have consented to take my place!

PART XI

I no longer knew where I was going, but was like a train going at full speed through a dense fog, and which in vain disturbs the perfect silence of the sleeping country with its puffing and shrill whistles; when the driver cannot distinguish the changing lights of the discs, nor the signals, and when soon some terrible crash will send the train off the rails, and the carriages will become a heap of ruins.

I was afraid of going mad, and at times I asked myself whether any of my family had shown any signs of mental aberration, and had been locked up in a lunatic asylum, and whether the life of constant fast pleasures, of turning night into day and of frequent violent emotions, that I had led for years, had not at last affected my brain.  If I had believed in anything, and in the science of the occult, which haunts so many restless brains, I should have imagined that some enemy was bewitching me and laying invisible snares for me, that he was suggesting those actions which were quite unworthy of the frank, upright and well-bred man that I was, and was trying to destroy the happiness of which she and I had dreamt.

For a whole week I devoted myself to that hateful business of playing the spy, and to those inquiries which were killing me.  I had succeeded in discovering the lady’s maid who had been in Elaine’s service before we were married, and whom she loved as if she had been her foster sister, who used to accompany her whenever she went out, when she went to visit the poor and when she went for a walk, who used to wake her every morning, do her hair and dress her.  She was young and rather pretty, and one saw that Paris had improved her and given her a polish, and that she knew her difficult business from end to end.