Late in the day of that half-rustic wedding, groups of country people, the girls conspicuous in their gay dresses, made the car of the newly married pair slow down while they cheered them; the road was strewn with acacia blossoms, and they passed a number of country carts pursuing a somewhat zigzag course, driven by certain cheerful fellows who had clearly had a glass or two of wine. As she recalled the night that followed, Thérèse murmured: “It was horrible”: then, correcting herself; “No, not so horrible as all that.” After all, she did not suffer much while they were travelling in the Italian lakes. She was absorbed in the game of keeping her secret. A fiancé is easily deceived, but a husband--! Any one can tell lies: but physical lying is a different art. It is not given to every one to imitate desire, delight, and the happy lassitude of love. Thérèse discovered how to bend her body to these impersonations, and she took a bitter pleasure in so doing. In that unknown world of sensations, which a man was now compelling her to explore, she could imagine that she, too, might have found a possible happiness. What would it have been like? When we stand before a landscape shrouded in rain and try to picture what it would have looked like in sunshine, so Thérèse became acquainted with desire. Her young husband Bernard, with his vacant eyes, always worried because the numbers on the pictures did not correspond with those given in Baedeker, content if he had seen the sights in the shortest possible time,--what an easy dupe he was! He was pent up in his pleasures, like those little pigs that are so charming to watch through the palings of their sty, snuffling with satisfaction, in their trough (“I was the trough”: thought Thérèse). He had their hurried, fussy, serious look: he was methodical. “Do you really think we should do that?” ventured Thérèse sometimes, in her stupefaction. He laughed and reassured her: Where had he learnt to classify everything affecting the body,--to distinguish the honest man’s caresses from those of the sadist? He was never in a moment’s doubt. One evening in Paris, where they stopped on their return journey, Bernard ostentatiously left a music-hall at which the performance shocked him: “And to think that foreigners see that! Disgraceful! And that is what they judge by....” Thérèse marvelled that this modest fellow was the same man whose patient ingenuities of the darkness she would, in less than an hour, have to endure.