VIII
After her confinement she changed her tactics. Whether she was influenced by fear of the consequences of her perverted passions, or whether her female instincts had been reawakened, I cannot say. She paid a great deal of attention to young men; but she did it too openly to make me really, jealous.
Without an engagement, with nothing to occupy her time, full of whims, despotic, she was bent on war with me to the knife.
One day she tried to prove to me that it was cheaper to keep three servants than two. As I thought it waste of time to argue with a lunatic, I simply turned her out of my room.
She swore vengeance. She engaged a third maid, who was absolutely superfluous in the house. Consequently no work was done at all. Everything was turned upside down, the three girls quarrelled all day long, drank beer and entertained their lovers at my expense.
To complete the picture of my matrimonial happiness, one of my children fell ill. This brought two more servants into the house and the visits of two doctors. At the end of the month I had to face a deficit of five hundred crowns. I redoubled my energies to meet the expenses, but the strain on my nerves was beginning to tell.
She was for ever taunting me with having squandered her more than doubtful dowry, and forced me to make an allowance to her aunt in Copenhagen. This woman accused me of having wasted her “fortune,” and her incredibly silly arguments irritated me beyond endurance. She affirmed that Marie’s mother, on her deathbed, had distinctly expressed the wish that she should share my wife’s inheritance. I failed to see what that had to do with me, for the “fortune” which she was to inherit existed in imagination only; but the fact remained that the burden of the aunt, who was lazy and incapable, was added to my other burdens. I gave way in the matter; I even agreed to guarantee a sum of money, raised by an older friend, adventuress number one, for my beloved wife had hit on the idea of selling me her favour. I admitted everything for the privilege of kissing her; I admitted having wasted her dowry, squandered her aunt’s “fortune,” ruined her theatrical career by marrying her, even having undermined her health.
Holy matrimony was degraded to legal prostitution.
She carefully treasured up all my admissions, and worked them into a legend which the papers greedily snapped up later on, and which was assiduously spread by all those of her friends whom I had turned out, one after the other.
My ruin had become an obsession with her. At the end of the year I found that I had given her twelve thousand crowns for household expenses, and I was compelled to ask my publishers for a sum in advance.
Whenever I reproached her with her extravagance, she invariably replied—
“Well, why have children and make your wife miserable? When I consider that I gave up a splendid position to marry you....”
But I had an answer to that taunt—
“As Baroness, my dear, your husband gave you three thousand crowns and debts. I give you three times as much, more than three times as much.”
She said nothing, but she turned her back upon me, and in the evening I admitted all her charges; I agreed that three thousand is three times as much as ten thousand that I was a blackguard, a miser, a “bel ami,” who had risen at the expense of his adored wife, adored more especially in her nightgown.
She poured all her venom into the first chapter of a novel, the subject of which was the exploitation of an oppressed wife by a criminal husband. Through my writings, on the other hand, always glided the white wraith of a lovely golden-haired woman, a madonna, a young mother. I was for ever chanting her praises, creating a glorious myth round the figure of the wondrous woman who by God’s grace had been sent to brighten the thorny path of a poet....
And the critics never tired of lauding the “good genius” of a pessimistic novelist, of pouring on her full measures of entirely undeserved praise....
The more I suffered under the persecutions of my shrew, the more eagerly I strove to weave a crown of light for her sacred head. The more I was depressed by the reality, the more I became inspired by my hallucinations of her loveliness... alas for the magic of love!