Lemonnier had remained a widower with one child.
He had loved his wife devotedly, with a tender and
exalted love, without a slip, during their entire
married life. He was a good, honest man, perfectly
simple, sincere, without suspicion or malice.
He fell in love with a poor neighbor, proposed and
was accepted. He was making a very comfortable
living out of the wholesale cloth business, and he
did not for a minute suspect that the young girl might
have accepted him for anything else but himself.
She made him happy. She was everything to him;
he only thought of her, looked at her continually,
with worshiping eyes. During meals he would make
any number of blunders, in order not to have to take
his eyes from the beloved face; he would pour the
wine in his plate and the water in the salt-cellar,
then he would laugh like a child, repeating:
“You see, I love you too much; that makes me
crazy.”
She would smile with a calm and resigned look; then
she would look away, as though embarrassed by the
adoration of her husband, and try to make him talk
about something else; but he would take her hand under
the table and he would hold it in his, whispering:
“My little Jeanne, my darling little Jeanne!”
She sometimes lost patience and said:
“Come, come, be reasonable; eat and let me eat.”
He would sigh and break off a mouthful of bread, which
he would then chew slowly.
For five years they had no children. Then suddenly
she announced to him that this state of affairs would
soon cease. He was wild with joy. He no
longer left her for a minute, until his old nurse,
who had brought him up and who often ruled the house,
would push him out and close the door behind him,
in order to compel him to go out in the fresh air.
He had grown very intimate with a young man who had
known his wife since childhood, and who was one of
the prefect’s secretaries. M. Duretour
would dine three times a week with the Lemonniers,
bringing flowers to madame, and sometimes a box at
the theater; and often, at the end of the dinner,
Lemonnier, growing tender, turning towards his wife,
would explain: “With a companion like you
and a friend like him, a man is completely happy on
earth.”
She died in childbirth. The shock almost killed
him. But the sight of the child, a poor, moaning
little creature, gave him courage.
He loved it with a passionate and sorrowful love,
with a morbid love in which stuck the memory of death,
but in which lived something of his worship for the
dead mother. It was the flesh of his wife, her
being continued, a sort of quintessence of herself.
This child was her very life transferred to another
body; she had disappeared that it might exist, and
the father would smother it in with kisses. But
also, this child had killed her; he had stolen this
beloved creature, his life was at the cost of hers.
And M. Lemonnier would place his son in the cradle
and would sit down and watch him. He would sit
this way by the hour, looking at him, dreaming of
thousands of things, sweet or sad. Then, when
the little one was asleep, he would bend over him and
sob.
