“What made you marry me?” she repeated, “your love, I suppose—at least, what you call love.” “Indeed, no Josephine,” he coolly replied. “It was not love at all. What makes a man keep a mistress? For that was it, and nothing more.” At this atrocious declaration, Madame Lafitte, the very inmost temple of her soul profaned and defiled, as it never had been till then, bowed her head in an agony of shame. “Yes, Josephine,” he continued, “that was it. You were a queen of a girl when I first saw you. Young, innocent, gentle, enchanting, the most beautiful woman then, as I think you are now, that I ever beheld, and though your family was poor, you were accomplished as few of your sex ever become. I wanted you for one of my mistresses, and I got you at the little expense of a marriage ceremony. A strict moralist might say that, at best, you were only my— ah, the coarse word! but in this country you are called my wife. And, _apropos_, do you know what they call this union of ours, contracted on my part from such a motive? They call it holy matrimony.” Mr. Lafitte, with a negrine _ptchih_, went off in a spasm of devilish merriment, keeping his eyes fixed on the bowed and pallid face of the woman opposite him. “You were in love with young Raynal when I married you,” he continued, “and you were bullied and badgered by your amiable family into wedlock with me. Of that, however, I will not speak now. But suppose, Josephine, that you wish a divorce. How are you going to get it? On what grounds? Now _apropos_ of my mistresses: by the law of Louisiana, were you false to me, I could get a divorce from you. By the same laws—oh, how I love them!—you could only get that divorce from me if I kept my mistress in your dwelling, or publicly and openly. Suppose you emigrated to another State where they grant divorces on the ground of the husband’s infidelity. Could you get a separation then? No. Why not? Because you have no evidence, and I have taken good care that you can have none. Ha! my dear, what do you think of your position?” “My God, my God!” she moaned, “what have I done that I should be outraged thus! How have I borne this life—how can I bear it! I tell you, Lafitte,” she cried, raising her voice, hoarse with anger and agony, into a higher key, and throwing out her arms with a furious gesture, “I tell you that this life is Hell. I know now, what I wondered when I was a child—where Hell is and what it looks like. It is here and it looks like this. This is one of its chambers, and this one of its mansions. These walls, those books, those pictures, this furniture, that fruit, that wine, they all belong to it. Those are its flowers clambering around the windows—this is its light and these are its shadows—this scorching heat is the heat of it, that sun is the sun of it, these slaves swelter in it—I, a slave like them, am tortured in it, and you are the fiend of it, hard, cruel, sensual, heartless, pitiless devil that you are!”