Honore de Balzac - At the Sign of the Cat and Racket.pdf - Bookstacks

without. A coldness insensibly crept over him, and inevitably
spread. To attain conjugal happiness we must climb a hill whose
summit is a narrow ridge, close to a steep and slippery descent:
the painter’s love was falling down it. He regarded his wife as
incapable of appreciating the moral considerations which
justified him in his own eyes for his singular behavior to her, and
believed himself quite innocent in hiding from her thoughts she
could not enter into, and peccadilloes outside the jurisdiction of
a bourgeois conscience. Augustine wrapped herself in sullen and
silent grief. These unconfessed feelings placed a shroud between
the husband and wife which could not fail to grow thicker day by
day. Though her husband never failed in consideration for her,
Augustine could not help trembling as she saw that he kept for
the outer world those treasures of wit and grace that he formerly
would lay at her feet. She soon began to find sinister meaning in
the jocular speeches that are current in the world as to the
inconstancy of men. She made no complaints, but her demeanor
conveyed reproach.
Three years after her marriage this pretty young woman,
who dashed past in her handsome carriage, and lived in a sphere
of glory and riches to the envy of heedless folk incapable of
taking a just view of the situations of life, was a prey to intense
grief. She lost her color; she reflected; she made comparisons;
then sorrow unfolded to her the first lessons of experience. She
determined to restrict herself bravely within the round of duty,
hoping that by this generous conduct she might sooner or later
win back her husband’s love. But it was not so. When
Sommervieux, fired with work, came in from his studio,
Augustine did not put away her work so quickly but that the
painter might find his wife mending the household linen, and his
own, with all the care of a good housewife. She supplied
generously and without a murmur the money needed for his
lavishness; but in her anxiety to husband her dear Theodore’s
fortune, she was strictly economical for herself and in certain
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