The police of marriage has its martyrology. We will cite but one
instance which will make plain how necessary it is for husbands who
resort to severe measures to keep watch over themselves as well as over
their wives.
An old miser who lived at T——-, a pleasure resort if there ever was
one, had married a young and pretty woman, and he was so wrapped up in
her and so jealous that love triumphed over avarice; he actually gave
up trade in order to guard his wife more closely, but his only real
change was that his covetousness took another form. I acknowledge that
I owe the greater portion of the observations contained in this essay,
which still is doubtless incomplete, to the person who made a study of
this remarkable marital phenomenon, to portray which, one single detail
will be amply sufficient. When he used to go to the country, this
husband never went to bed without secretly raking over the pathways of
his park, and he had a special rake for the sand of his terraces. He
had made a close study of the footprints made by the different members
of his household; and early in the morning he used to go and identify
the tracks that had been made there.
“All this is old forest land,” he used to say to the person I have
referred to, as he showed him over the park; “for nothing can be seen
through the brushwood.”
His wife fell in love with one of the most charming young men of the
town. This passion had continued for nine years bright and fresh in the
hearts of the two lovers, whose sole avowal had been a look exchanged
in a crowded ball-room; and while they danced together their trembling
hands revealed through the scented gloves the depth of their love. From
that day they had both of them taken great delight on those trifles
which happy lovers never disdain. One day the young man led his only
confidant, with a mysterious air, into a chamber where he kept under
glass globes upon his table, with more care than he would have bestowed
upon the finest jewels in the world, the flowers that, in the
excitement of the dance, had fallen from the hair of his mistress, and
the finery which had been caught in the trees which she had brushed
through in the park. He also preserved there the narrow footprint left
upon the clay soil by the lady’s step.
“I could hear,” said this confidant to me afterwards, “the violent and
repressed palpitations of his heart sounding in the silence which we
preserved before the treasures of this museum of love. I raised my eyes
to the ceiling, as if to breathe to heaven the sentiment which I dared
not utter. ‘Poor humanity!’ I thought. ‘Madame de ——- told me that one
evening at a ball you had been found nearly fainting in her card-room?’
I remarked to him.
“‘I can well believe it,’ said he casting down his flashing glance, ‘I
had kissed her arm!—But,’ he added as he pressed my hand and shot at me
a glance that pierced my heart, ‘her husband at that time had the gout
which threatened to attack his stomach.’”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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