from being called in drawing-rooms, and also in the newspapers, one of the most beautiful women in Paris, you tried everything you could think of to keep admirers from me, and you hit upon the abominable idea of making me spend my life in a constant state of pregnancy, until the time when I should disgust every man.  Oh! do not deny it!  I did not understand it for some time, but then I guessed it.  You even boasted about it to your sister, who told me of it, for she is fond of me and was disgusted at your boorish coarseness.

“Ah!  Remember our struggles, doors smashed in, and locks forced!  For eleven years you have condemned me to the existence of a brood mare on a studfarm.  Then as soon as I was pregnant, you grew disgusted with me, and I saw nothing of you for months, and I was sent into the country, to the family mansion, among fields and meadows, to bring forth my child.  And when I reappeared, fresh, pretty and indestructible, still seductive and constantly surrounded by admirers, hoping that at last I should live a little like a young rich woman who belongs to society, you were seized by jealousy again, and you recommenced to persecute me with that infamous and hateful desire from which you are suffering at this moment, by my side.  And it is not desire of possessing me, for I should never have refused myself to you, but it is the wish to make me unsightly.

“Besides this, that abominable and mysterious circumstance took place, which I was a long time in penetrating (but I grew acute by dint of watching your thoughts and actions):  You attached yourself to your children with all the security which they gave you while I bore them in my womb.  You felt affection for them, with all your aversion for me, and in spite of your ignoble fears, which were momentarily allayed by your pleasure in seeing me grow stouter.

“Oh!  How often have I noticed that joy in you!  I have seen it in your eyes and guessed it.  You loved your children as victories, and not because they were of your own blood.  They were victories over me, over my youth, over my beauty, over my charms, over the compliments which were paid me, and over those who whispered round me, without paying them to me.  And you are proud of them, you make a parade of them, you take them out for drives in your break in the Bois de Boulogne, and you give them donkey rides at Montmorency.  You take them to theatrical matinees so that you may be seen in the midst of them, so that people may say:  ‘What a kind father,’ and that it may be repeated....”

He had seized her wrist with savage brutality, and he squeezed it so violently that she was quiet, and nearly cried out with the pain, and he said to her in a whisper: 

“I love my children.  Do you hear?  What you have just told me is disgraceful in a mother.  But you belong to me; I am master ... your master ...  I can exact from you what I like and when I like ... and I have the law ... on my side.”