Note 493 — Chapter XIII

At the risk, however, of wearying the reader and "forcing open doors," one may exemplify, from this book also, the artificial character of this obligatory adultery. Anne de Guilleroy has all the qualifications of an almost perfect mistress (in the honourable sense) and wife. She is charming; a flirt to the right point and not beyond it; passionate ditto; affectionate; not capricious; inviolably faithful (in her unfaithfulness, of course); jealous to her own pain, but with no result of malice to others. Yet in order to show all this she has to be an adulteress first—in obedience to this mysterious modernisation and topsy-turvification of ancient Babylonian custom, and the jus primae noctis, and the proverb as to second thoughts being best, and Heaven or the other place knows what else. Here also, as elsewhere, Maupassant—satirist of women as he is—makes her lover a very inferior creature to herself. For Bertin is a selfish coxcomb, and does, at least half, allow himself to be "snuffed out by an article."