Conjugal Love Read Free

tastes and also by a talent which, in my better moments, I was under the illusion that I possessed.
    What happened, on the contrary, was that I never went beyond the first two or three pages of any composition; and with women, I never attained to that depth of feeling which convinces both ourselves and others. The thing that did me most harm in both my sentimental and creative efforts was, precisely, that facility of mine for enthusiasm, which was just as prompt to be kindled as it was quick to fade. How many times - in a kiss snatched from unwilling lips, in two or three pages written at furious speed - did I think I had found what I was seeking! And then, with the woman, I would slip at once into a wordy sentimentality that ended by alienating her from me; and, as I wrote, I would lose myself in sophistries, or else in a flood of words into which, for lack of serious inspiration, I was led by a momentary facility. My first impetus was good, and deceived both myself and others; but then some indefinable weakness, cold and discursive, would creep in. And I would realize that in reality I had not loved or written so much as wished to love and to write. Sometimes, too, I would find a woman who, either for her own advantage or out of pity, was prepared to allow herself to be taken in and to delude me as well; on other occasions the written page seemed to resist me and to invite me to continue. But I have anyhow one good thing about me - a diffident conscience which halts me in time upon the path of illusion. I would tear up the pages and, under some pretext or other, stop visiting the lady. And so, in such vain attempts, youth fled by.
     
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    T HERE is no need for me to say where and how I first met my wife: it must have been in a drawing-room, or at a watering-place, or somewhere like that. She was about my own age, and it seemed to me that in many respects her life resembled mine. This was true, actually, in only a few respects, and superficial ones at that - merely that she, like me, was well-off and leisured and that she moved in the same circles and led the same kind of life; but to me, with my usual ephemeral enthusiasm, this seemed a most important thing, almost as though I had found my twin soul. She had been married very young, at Milan, her native place, to a man she did not love. The marriage had lasted a couple of years and then the pair had separated and later had obtained a divorce in Switzerland. Since then my wife had always lived alone. The thing that at once aroused in my mind the hope that I had at last found the woman I was looking for, was the confession she made to me the very day that I met her for the first time, to the effect that she was weary of the life she had hitherto led and that she wanted to settle down in an alliance of true affection. In this confession, which was made with great simplicity and without any emotion - just as though it were a question of a practical programme rather than the pathetic aspiration of a loveless life - I seemed to recognize the same state of mind that had dominated me for so many years; and immediately, with my usual initial impulsiveness, I decided that she must be my wife.
    I don't think that Leda is very intelligent; but with a mediocre intelligence she nevertheless succeeded, thanks to the importance she assumed in my life and to her air of experience and her nicely calculated mingling of indulgence and irony, in acquiring in my eyes a mysterious authority; owing to this her slightest gesture of understanding and encouragement was, to me, both precious and flattering. I was under the illusion at that time that I had persuaded her to marry me; but I can now say that it was she who had determined upon it, and that without that determination on her part the marriage would never have taken place. I was still in the preliminary stages of my courtship, which I imagined would be long and difficult, when she, almost forcing my hand, gave herself to me. But this