A Woman's Confession by Guy De Maupassant — Read

You ask me to tell you about the most vivid recollections of my life. I am very old and have neither children nor relatives, and am therefore free to confide in you. Only promise that you will never reveal my name. As you know, I have been very much loved and have myself often loved in return. I was very beautiful; I may say so now that nothing remains of my beauty. To me love was the life of the soul just as air is the life of the body. I would rather have died than lived without affection, without being the constant subject of someone's thought. Women often pretend that they only love once with all the strength of their feelings; I have often been so desperately in love that it was impossible to think that it could ever end, but the feeling always died out quite naturally, like a fire that lacks fuel. Today I will tell you my first adventure, a quite innocent one so far as I was concerned, but it led to others. The terrible revenge of that dreadful chemist of Pecq reminds me of the appalling drama I witnessed much against my will.

I had been married a year to a rich man, the Count Hervé de Ker, a member of an old Breton family, whom of course I did not love. Real love requires, at least so it seems to me, both freedom and opposition. Can that which is imposed upon one from the outside, sanctioned by law and blessed by the priest, be love? A legal kiss is never as good as a kiss that is stolen. My husband was tall, elegant, and quite the aristocrat in appearance. But he lacked intelligence. He spoke sharply and expressed opinions calculated to wound his hearers. One felt his mind to be full of ready-made thoughts transmitted by his father and mother, who had themselves got them from their ancestors. He never hesitated a moment, but gave directly his narrow-minded opinions about everything, without embarrassment and without realising that there might be other points of view. You felt that his mind was closed to all outer influences, that it contained none of those ideas that renew and cleanse the mind, like a breath of fresh air passing through a house with open doors and windows.