Explore "Misti" by Guy de Maupassant on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
My mistress at that time was a funny little woman. She was married, of course, for I've a perfect horror of unmarried women. After all, what pleasure can one have in possessing a woman who has the double disadvantage of belonging to no one and belonging to everyone? And honestly, quite apart from the moral side of the question, I can't understand love as a profession. It rather disgusts me. It's a weakness, I know, and I confess it.
The chiefest pleasure enjoyed by a bachelor who has a married woman for his mistress, is that she provides him with a home, a comfortable, pleasant home in which everyone looks after him and spoils him, from the husband to the servants. Every pleasure is there united, love, friendship, even paternity, the bed and the table, which constitute the final happiness of life, together with the incalculable advantage of being able to change your household from time to time, of installing yourself by turns in every different class of family, in the country, during the summer, in the home of the workman who lets you a room in his house; in the middle-class home of the provincial, during the winter, even in the homes of the aristocracy, if you are ambitious.