But her memory unhesitatingly gave her the answer. She remembered all the circumstances, particularly frequent in the first days of their marriage, when Albert had tried to shake off her apathy, to give to her a little vital energy. In traveling, at the fireside, in the wintertime, in Paris, on the terrace at Saint Martin, in the summer, he had tried to vivify the past, nature, art, books, the fleeting moment. How much time and effort he had used to try to interest her, to awaken her passion, to increase the value of her days! She thought of this with tenderness and understood it to be proofs of his love. "He did love me. He loved me before he loved her--When he spoke to me enthusiastically, feelingly, about his favorite works or things of the past, it was love that he was holding out to me. To understand life one must love it--one must love. I see it now...." She had built up that wall against which all force is useless: the power of unresponsiveness. Her resistance had been constant. To her understanding, to live meant to let live. Had she not filled daily her petty duties as mistress of the house, and her simple maternal duties as well? What more could she do? The bitterness her husband sometimes manifested, which he rapidly overcame, but which showed frequently on his face when he came home, had seemed unjust. Now she explained it to herself. The home lacked a living, happy soul to give meaning to the humblest cares; to the most trifling needs, diffusing that spirit of harmony, relaxation, peace, which allows the man of mental activity to follow the course of his thoughts, to gather them and afterwards give expression to them--not in muddled sentences, but with quiet authority, capable of soothing and comforting other people, and awakening them to a realization of the flight of time. So, by an exalted intuition, vague and pathetic--she began to understand the rôle that fate had assigned to her in which she had failed. Her children had appreciated their father more than she had. When they welcomed him with their laughter, with their shouts of joy, and when they unceasingly asked him for new toys or stories, they were instinctively paying him homage. They attributed to him the power of doubling their happiness in life. And he himself met with only indolence or indifference, as if, in spite of his strength, he never had need of rest and relaxation. Year by year he felt himself more alone and unsatisfied. And other women, noticing that loneliness, waited upon him, and recognizing his superiority, tempted him. She had never guessed at this menace which hung over her. She had not anticipated Anne de Sézery. Without doubt she was the cause and origin of her own unhappiness.