Happy in
being her husband's sole delight, she believed that her
inextinguishable love would always be her greatest grace in his eyes,
as her devotion and obedience would be a perennial charm. And, indeed,
the ecstasy of love had made her so brilliantly lovely that her beauty
filled her with pride, and gave her confidence that she could always
reign over a man so easy to kindle as Monsieur de Sommervieux. Thus
her position as a wife brought her no knowledge but the lessons of
love.
In the midst of her happiness, she was still the simple child who had
lived in obscurity in the Rue Saint-Denis, and who never thought of
acquiring the manners, the information, the tone of the world she had
to live in. Her words being the words of love, she revealed in them,
no doubt, a certain pliancy of mind and a certain refinement of
speech; but she used the language common to all women when they find
themselves plunged in passion, which seems to be their element. When,
by chance, Augustine expressed an idea that did not harmonize with
Theodore's, the young artist laughed, as we laugh at the first
mistakes of a foreigner, though they end by annoying us if they are
not corrected.
In spite of all this love-making, by the end of this year, as
delightful as it was swift, Sommervieux felt one morning the need for
resuming his work and his old habits. His wife was expecting their
first child. He saw some friends again. During the tedious discomforts
of the year when a young wife is nursing an infant for the first time,
he worked, no doubt, with zeal, but he occasionally sought diversion
in the fashionable world.
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