Note 39 — PART II DREAMS (continued 3)
Joan Riviere translation
Whilst correcting these pages, my eye happened to fall upon a newspaper paragraph which I reproduce here as affording unexpected confirmation of the above words.
DIVINE RETRIBUTION
A Broken Arm for a Broken Marriage-Vow.
Frau Anna M., the wife of a soldier in the reserve, accused Frau Clementine K. of unfaithfulness to her husband. In her accusation she stated that Frau K. had had an illicit relationship with Karl M. during her husband’s absence at the front, and while he was sending her as much as 70 crowns a month. Besides this, she had already received a large sum of money from her (Frau M.’s) husband, while his wife and children had to live in hunger and misery. Some of her husband’s comrades had informed her that he and Frau K. had visited public-houses together and remained there drinking late into the night. The accused woman had once actually asked the husband of the accuser, in the presence of several soldiers, whether he would not soon leave his “old woman” and come to her, and the caretaker of the house where Frau K. lived had repeatedly seen the plaintiff’s husband in Frau K.’s room, in a state of complete undress.
Yesterday, before a magistrate in the Leopoldstadt, Frau K. denied knowing M. at all: any intimate relations between them were out of the question, she said.
Albertine M., a witness, however, gave evidence of having surprised Frau K. in the act of kissing the accuser’s husband.
M., who had been called as a witness in some earlier proceedings, had then denied any intimate relations with the accused. Yesterday, a letter was handed to the magistrate, in which the witness retracted his former denial and confessed that up to the previous June he had carried on illicit relations with Frau K. In the earlier proceedings he had denied his relations with the accused only because she had come to him before the action came into court and begged him on her knees to save her and say nothing. “To-day,” wrote the witness, “I feel compelled to lay a full confession before the court, for I have broken my left arm and regard this as God’s punishment for my offence.”
The judge decided that the penal offence had been committed too long ago for the action to stand, whereupon the accuser withdrew her accusation and the accused was discharged.