Through a spirit of contradiction in which vanity played the chief part, I turned her attention to works palpitating with unrest, misery, passion or sensuality. The contortions of a Laocoön, the “Dying Gladiator” crushed to the ground, Apollo darting forward with a theatrical gesture, Venus bowed under the weight of her own beauty and not like a Diana free in her movements,--these satisfied me but offended her. She did not respond to my enthusiasms, surmising perhaps that they were forced, and inwardly I reproached her for not understanding, for not knowing. “She knows nothing,” I thought, “of the passion that disfigures, the jealousy that twists, the doubt that convulses these countenances and permits them no peace. For the moment she and I are far apart.” And I prided myself on the discovery. All this she was to learn one day through me without permitting any alteration in her features to reveal it, merely becoming whiter and more distant as my cruelty increased and she grew nearer to death, death which writes for us our definitive expression, her own too pure and too noble to lower itself to complaints. These differences, which I considered insignificant and which were in fact hardly perceptible, were they not already part of a more profound discord? * * * Nevertheless the first months of our marriage flowed on like a limpid stream that seems motionless. Our days slipped by without our being aware of them. I was amazed at the intimate peace I breathed; it did not seem consistent with the passion I wished to feel again. In time I came to ask myself whether I was really sufficiently in love. I looked for disturbances, outbreaks, storms, a great thirst for life, and around me, within me, I found only simplicity and clearness. Thus I grew distrustful of the new order that was making over my heart. I had been accustomed to think of love as a combat, and victory appeared to me to be filled with idleness. I began to scorn the harmony which was for her the summit of love, which united her by a thousand secret bonds to artistic perfection. I was afraid of monotony, even though I had not known it, I attained it very soon through the bitterness I mingled with Raymonde’s pure offerings. * * * Among the books and the guides that I had selected in order to give her what I called, pretentiously enough, “intellectual culture,” were included some extracts from Chateaubriand, compositions that conjured up ruins, prose nothings that accompanied admirable descriptions throbbing with the soul of Rome, After a visit to the church of Saint Louis-des-Français, in which Chateaubriand had erected the tomb of Pauline de Beaumont--she is reclining on a couch, one arm hanging down and the other folded, in a mournful attitude that is much too beautiful--I read aloud the passage from the “Memoirs,” in which her lover tells of alms that he had condescended to bestow upon one in agony.