Madame Bergeret had a horror of silence and solitude, and now that M. Bergeret never spoke to her and lived apart from her, her room was as terrifying as a tomb to her mind. She never entered it without turning white. Her daughters would, at least, have supplied the noise and movement needed if she were to remain sane; but when an epidemic of typhus broke out in the autumn she sent them to visit their aunt, Mademoiselle Zoé Bergeret, at Arcachon. There they had spent the winter, and there their father meant to leave them, in the present state of his affairs. Madame Bergeret was a domesticated woman, with a housewifely mind. To her, adultery had been nothing more than a mere extension of wedded life, a gleam from her hearth-fire. She had been driven to it by a matronly pride in her position far more than by the wanton promptings of the flesh. She had always intended that her slight lapse with young M. Roux should remain a secret, homely habit, just a taste of adultery that would merely involve, imply, and confirm that state of matrimony which is held in honour by the world, as well as sanctified by the Church, and which secures a woman in a position of personal safety and social dignity. Madame Bergeret was a Christian wife and knew that marriage is a sacrament whose lofty and lasting results cannot be effaced by any fault such as she had committed, for serious though it might be, it was yet a pardonable and excusable lapse. Without being in a position to estimate her offence with great moral perspicuity, she felt instinctively that it was trifling and simple, being neither malicious, nor inspired by that deep passion which alone can dignify error with the splendour of crime and hurl the guilty woman into the abyss. She not only felt that she was no great criminal, but also that she had never had the chance of being one. Yet now she had to stand watching the entirely unforeseen results of such a trifling episode, as to her terror they slowly and gloomily unfolded themselves before her. She suffered cruel pangs at finding herself alone and fallen within her own house, at having lost the sovereignty of her home, and at having been despoiled, as it were, of her cares of kitchen and store-cupboard. Suffering was not good for her and brought no purification in its train; it merely awoke in her paltry mind, at one moment the instinct of revolt, and at another, a passion for self-humiliation. Every day, about three o’clock in the afternoon, she went out and paid visits at her friends’ houses. On these expeditions she walked with great strides, a grim, stiff figure with bright eyes, flaming cheeks and gaudy dress. She called on all the lower-middle-class ladies of the town, on Madame Torquet, the dean’s wife; on Madame Leterrier, the rector’s wife; on Madame Ossian Colot, the wife of the prison governor, and on Madame Surcouf, the recorder’s wife. She was not received by the society ladies, nor by the wives of the great capitalists.