Convicts also are paired with a chain without any regard to their sympathies, but they have at least the psychical relationship of crime, and often vice, which brings them near each other, and also that other common hope of escape that makes them allies and even brethren; but in that other galley of a badly assorted marriage there is not one chain alone, but a hundred and a thousand, all invisible, with as many nerves connecting two existences condemned to the sad communion of a common torture which is doubled for each by the suffering of the other. There is the chain of the heart, the chains of taste and sympathy, the chains of antipathy, habits, desires, and regrets; and along the length of these chains there run currents of spite, hatred, rancour, malediction, vengeance, and retaliation. The slightest movement on one side is communicated to the other by the chains, and makes that other feel his pain, which he returns doubled by its own force and rendered crueller by the desire of revenge. So each wrong has an echo, and the echo is doubled and increased a hundredfold, until the whole life becomes a torment, as if every nerve had tetanus, and every organ of body and soul was transformed into a tooth suffering spasms of pain. When a long-forgotten wound is cicatrised, and a rougher movement than usual re-opens the wound anew, in that martyred frame there is not a member which does not suffer nor a single feeling that is not pain. This is the meaning of incompatibility of character, which has been adjudged with reason by legislators as a sufficient cause for divorce, and it is, and ought to be, more so than impotence, bad treatment, or any other cause of separation. ⁂ This want of harmony in sentiment has only too many and too varied forms, but at the foundation there is always this skeleton: _That which I like you dislike; that which makes you happy makes me suffer._ Woman is an ermine, who allows herself to be killed rather than cross a field of snow soiled by mud. Man, on the contrary, is like a chimpanzee, who loves dirt and soils himself with it. There is no part of his body or soul which does not love this mud. How can two such creatures live together? ⁂ He is an optimist even to cynicism, an egoist even to adoration of himself, and his motto is, _Après moi le déluge_. She is a pessimist from having placed her ideal so high that no human hand can reach it. She cannot not live an hour without loving and dedicating a thought, an act, or a sacrifice to the good of some fellow-creature. How could they ever live together? ⁂ He has never felt the want of the supernatural, and believes neither in God nor in a soul. She was born a mystic, and the maternal education has made her religious and superstitious. She has a very strong tendency to asceticism. How could two such beings be happy together? ⁂