University of Virginia Library

18.
CHAPTER XVIII.

"SO WE lived in the city. In the city the
wretched feel less sad. One can live there a
hundred years without being noticed, and be
dead a long time before anybody will notice it.

People have no time to inquire into your life.

All are absorbed. Business, social relations, art,
the health of children, their education. And
there are visits that must be received and made;
it is necessary to see this one, it is necessary to
hear that one or the other one. In the city there
are always one, two, or three celebrities that it is
indispensable that one should visit. Now one
must care for himself, or care for such or such
a little one, now it is the professor, the private
tutor, the governesses, . . . and life is absolute-
ly empty. In this activity we were less conscious
of the sufferings of our cohabitation. Moreover,
in the first of it, we had a superb occupation,—
the arrangement of the new dwelling, and then,
too, the moving from the city to the country, and
from the country to the city.

"Thus we spent a winter. The following
winter an incident happened to us which passed
unnoticed, but which was the fundamental cause
of all that happened later. My wife was suffer-
ing, and the rascals (the doctors) would not per-
mit her to conceive a child, and taught her how
to avoid it. I was profoundly disgusted. I
struggled vainly against it, but she insisted

frivolously and obstinately, and I surrendered.

The last justification of our life as wretches was
thereby suppressed, and life became baser than
ever.

"The peasant and the workingman need chil-
dren, and hence their conjugal relations have
a justification. But we, when we have a few
children, have no need of any more. They make
a superfluous confusion of expenses and joint
heirs, and are an embarrassment. Consequently
we have no excuses for our existence as
wretches, but we are so deeply degraded that we
do not see the necessity of a justification. The
majority of people in contemporary society give
themselves up to this debauchery without the
slightest remorse. We have no conscience left,
except, so to speak, the conscience of public
opinion and of the criminal code. But in this
matter neither of these consciences is struck.

There is not a being in society who blushes at it.

Each one practices it,—X, Y, Z, etc. What is
the use of multiplying beggars, and depriving
ourselves of the joys of social life? There is no
necessity of having conscience before the crimi-
nal code, or of fearing it: low girls, soldiers'

wives who throw their children into ponds or
wells, these certainly must be put in prison. But
with us the suppression is effected opportunely
and properly.

"Thus we passed two years more. The
method prescribed by the rascals had evidently
succeeded. My wife had grown stouter and
handsomer. It was the beauty of the end of
summer. She felt it, and paid much attention to
her person. She had acquired that provoking
beauty that stirs men. She was in all the brill-
iancy of the wife of thirty years, who conceives
no children, eats heartily, and is excited. The
very sight of her was enough to frighten one.

She was like a spirited carriage-horse that has
long been idle, and suddenly finds itself without
a bridle. As for my wife, she had no bridle, as
for that matter, ninety-nine hundredths of our
women have none."