“How horrible life is!  If by any chance we come across any sweetness in it, we sin in letting ourselves be happy, and pay dearly for it afterward.”

He said in a whisper: 

“Do not speak of that any more, mother.”

“Is that possible?  I think of nothing else.”

“You will forget it.”

Again she was silent; then with deep regret she said: 

“How happy I might have been, married to another man!”

She was visiting it on Roland now, throwing all the responsibility of her sin on his ugliness, his stupidity, his clumsiness, the heaviness of his intellect, and the vulgarity of his person.  It was to this that it was owing that she had betrayed him, had driven one son to desperation, and had been forced to utter to the other the most agonizing confession that can make a mother’s heart bleed.  She muttered:  “It is so frightful for a young girl to have to marry such a husband as mine.”

Jean made no reply.  He was thinking of the man he had hitherto believed to be his father; and possibly the vague notion he had long since conceived, of that father’s inferiority, with his brother’s constant irony, the scornful indifference of others, and the very maid-servant’s contempt for Roland, had somewhat prepared his mind for his mother’s terrible avowal.  It had all made it less dreadful to him to find that he was another man’s son; and if, after the great shock and agitation of the previous evening, he had not suffered the reaction of rage, indignation, and rebellion which Mme. Roland had feared, it was because he had long been unconsciously chafing under the sense of being the child of this well-meaning lout.

They had now reached the dwelling of Mme. Rosemilly.

She lived on the road to Sainte-Adresse, on the second floor of a large tenement which she owned.  The windows commanded a view of the whole roadstead.

On seeing Mme. Roland, who entered first, instead of merely holding out her hands as usual, she put her arms round her and kissed her, for she divined the purpose of her visit.

The furniture of this drawing-room, all in stamped velvet, was always shrouded in chair-covers.  The walls, hung with flowered paper, were graced by four engravings, the purchase of her late husband, the captain.  They represented sentimental scenes of seafaring life.  In the first a fisherman’s wife was seen, waving a handkerchief on shore, while the vessel which bore away her husband vanished on the horizon.  In the second the same woman, on her knees on the same shore, under a sky shot with lightning, wrung her arms as she gazed into the distance at her husband’s boat which was going to the bottom amid impossible waves.

The others represented similar scenes in a higher rank of society.  A young lady with fair hair, resting her elbows on the ledge of a large steamship quitting the shore, gazed at the already distant coast with eyes full of tears and regret.  Whom is she leaving behind?