ANNETTE. What can you do? I shall be turned away from here. LUCIE. If you are, I’ll go with you. ANNETTE. And your children? LUCIE. I’ll take them, too. ANNETTE. He’ll fetch them back. Besides, what should we live on? LUCIE. Ah! ANNETTE. You see. You can’t do anything either, Madeleine, for all your love. Your husband wouldn’t let you take me in. Nor you either, Catherine. You couldn’t afford to. Well, then? CATHERINE. Eh! eh! _Fresh silence._ ANNETTE. What a terrible thing life is! MADELEINE. For all women. ANNETTE. Not for anyone as much as for me. MADELEINE. You think so, and that’s why you think of dying. Well, I’m alive. You see me laughing now and then. If you only knew! CATHERINE. And what about about me, Annette? ANNETTE. You have your children to console you. CATHERINE. It’s they that make it hard for me. ANNETTE. For other women it’s a refuge to have children. What will it be for me? MADELEINE. You think that I am happy, Annette? ANNETTE. You have a husband who loves you, you’re rich, you can afford to dress beautifully, you go everywhere, and everyone wants to have you. That’s some happiness, isn’t it? MADELEINE. That’s all you see. If you only knew what you don’t see! CATHERINE. Do you think being a mother has made me happy? ANNETTE. I know you’re poor. You have to work, to work hard, to bring up your children; but you can look the world in the face and love them. CATHERINE. If you knew! MADELEINE. Then you must know! Even Lucie doesn’t know what I’m going to say. You think I’m happy because the money my godmother left me enabled me to marry the man of my choice, a man who was well off. Listen, then. My husband married me because I was good looking. He wanted a son. I gave him one, but my child cost me his love. You can’t be a wife and a mother at the same time. I lost my elegant figure, I was ill, I suffered the woes that woman’s flesh is heir to and—he left me for another woman! Don’t be too quick to condemn worldly women who shrink from motherhood, Annette. Man’s baseness is such that they must often choose between their husbands and their children. And if some choose their husband, let those who have never loved throw the first stone at them! I felt that if I nursed my baby I should lose my husband for good, and to win him back I put my child out to nurse. He died, Annette; and I have the agony of thinking that if I had kept him with me he would be alive. Do you understand? It’s as if I had killed him. Now I don’t mean to have another child. I lead a worldly life, laughing, dining out, going to parties, because that’s what my husband wants, and that’s how he loves me. I shall have a lonely old age. My arms are empty—mine, whose joy would have been to rock my children to sleep in them—and I’m ashamed of what I’m doing. I despise myself. You’d think I’d paid enough for my husband’s love, wouldn’t you? Oh, no. He’s gone to Paris, ostensibly on business, really to another woman. I know it.