Concluding Remarks of the Author
This is a terrible book, I fully admit it, and I regret that I ever wrote it.
How did I come to write it?
I had to wash my corpse before it was laid in its coffin.
Four years ago, if I remember rightly, a friend of mine, a writer, a declared enemy of the indiscretions—of others—said to me one day when talking about my first marriage—
“Do you know, it would make excellent copy for the sort of novel which I should like to write.”
Certain of my friend’s applause, I decided there and then to write it myself.
“Don’t be angry with me, dear old fellow, that I, as the original owner, make use of my property.”
I also remember, it is twelve years ago now, a remark my future mother-in-law made to me one evening when I was watching her daughter carrying on a flirtation with a group of young men—
“Wouldn’t she make a splendid heroine for a novel?”
“With what title?”
“A passionate woman!”
Happy mother, who died in the nick of time, I have carried out your suggestion. The novel has been written. I can die in peace.
MS. 1888.
The other day I met again the hero of this novel. I upbraided him for having induced me to publish the story of his first marriage. He is married again, father of a sweet little girl, and looks ten years younger.
“Dear old boy,” he said in reply to my reproaches, “the sympathy which everybody felt for the heroine of the novel, when it was first published, absolves me. You! may gauge from this fact the great depth of the love I bore her, for not only did it survive so much brutality, but it communicated itself even to the reader. This, however, has not prevented a French academician from denouncing my constancy as weakness, my steadfast loyalty to my family, including my children, baseness, in view of my wife’s brutality, inconstancy and dishonesty. I wonder whether this man would consider an insignificant Caserio superior to an eminent Carnot, simply because the former stabbed the latter?
“Moreover, this book, which you had wanted to write yourself, is only the woof of a fabric the richness of which is known only to those of my countrymen who have followed my literary career as it unfolded itself side by side with the sorrows of my heart, without suffering to be influenced. I could have left the battlefield. I remained steadfastly at my post. I fought against the enemy at home, day and night. Was this not courage?
“The ’poor, defenceless woman’ was backed by the four Scandinavian kingdoms, where she counted nothing but allies in her war against a man who was sick, solitary, poor, and threatened with confinement in a lunatic asylum because his intellect rebelled against the deification of woman, this penultimate superstition of the free-thinkers.
“The dear souls who conceal their revengeful thoughts under the term ‘divine justice’ have condemned my ‘Confession’ in the name of their Nemesis divina, bringing spurious evidence for their assertion that I had deceived the husband of Marie’s first marriage. Let them read the scene where the Baron throws his wife into my arms, when I stood before him with clean hands and confessed to him my guiltless love for the wife he neglected. Let them remember the important fact that I took upon my young shoulders the whole burden of our fault, to save his position in the army and the future of his little girl. Let them then say whether it is just to punish an act of self-sacrifice by an act of brutal revenge.
“One must be young and foolish to act as I have acted, I admit that. But it will not happen again—never again.... But... enough of it! And then... no... good-bye!”
He walked away quickly, leaving me under the spell of his perfect honesty.
I never again regretted having published the story of this idealist, who has now disappeared from literature and the world. But I abandoned my former intention to write “The Confession of a Foolish Woman,” because, after all, it goes too much against common-sense to allow a criminal to give evidence against her victim.
French Original Edition, 1894.
It was the outspoken account of his first marriage, written in self-defence and as a last testament, for he intended to take his life as soon as the book was finished. For five years the sealed manuscript, which was not meant for publication, was in the safe keeping of a relative. Only in the spring of 1893, under the pressure of circumstances and after public opinion and the press had attacked him in the most unjust manner, did he sell the book to a publisher.
“Separated,” 1902.
The End