Act of Passion by Georges Simenon

house. Just the sound of footsteps on the fine gravel of the paths was for me a sign of luxury, and I had finally made myself a present of something I had been coveting, a revolving sprinkler for watering the lawn.
    I was not speaking lightly, your Honour, when I told you that one generation, more or less, could be of capital importance.
    Armande was I don't know how many generations ahead of me. Her ancestors - we have any number of families like hers in the Vendée - most probably made their fortune buying confiscated property at the time of the Revolution and afterwards ennobled themselves with a de.
    I am making every effort, you can see that, to get as close to the truth as possible. God knows, at the point I have reached, a little more or a little less doesn't matter. I believe that I am as frank as a man can be. And I am as lucid as one becomes only after one has crossed to the other side.
    But that doesn't prevent my being conscious of my impotence. Everything that I have just told you is true and is false. And yet, night after night, stretched out beside Armande in the same bed, I have asked myself the question, I have asked myself why she was there.
    And now, your Honour, I ask myself, and this is more serious, if, after having read me, you will not eventually ask yourself the same question, not with regard to my own affairs, but with regard to yours.
    I married her.
    All right! The same night she slept in my bed. The same night I made love with her, very badly for her and for me. I was embarrassed because I was sweating - I sweat very easily - and because I felt clumsy and inexperienced.
    Do you know what was the most difficult thing of all? To kiss her on the mouth. Because of that smile. For, night and day, she keeps an identical smile, which is her natural expression. Well, it isn't easy to kiss a smile like that.
    After ten years, I had the impression, whenever I 'climbed her' (as my father would have said), that she was laughing at me.
    What haven't I thought on the subject of Armande! You don't know our house. Everybody will tell you that it has become one of the most agreeable houses in Ls Roche-sur-Yon. Even our old furniture, the few pieces that are left, have taken on such a different aspect that my mother and I hardly recognize them.
    Well, for me, it has always been her house .
    The food is excellent, but it is her food.
    And my friends? After a year I no longer looked upon them as my friends but hers .
    And as a matter of fact they all took her part later on when things happened - all of them, including the one I thought my best friends, those I had known as a student, those I had known as a boy.
    'You're lucky to have found such a wife!'
    Yes, your Honour. Yes, gentlemen. I realize it with due humility. And it is because I realized it, day after day, for ten years that...
    Forgive me! I'm off the track again. But I have such a strong feeling that it would take a very little effort to get to the bottom of things, once and for all!
    In medicine, diagnosis is the thing that counts. Once the malady has been tracked down, it is only a question of routine or the knife. And what I am furiously attempting is a diagnosis.
    I never loved Jeanne and I never asked myself if I loved her. I never loved any of the girls I happened to sleep with. I never felt the need, nor the desire. More than that. The word love , except in the trivial locution to make love , seemed to me a word that a kind of modesty keeps one from pronouncing.
    Do people talk about love in the country?
    At home they say:
    'I went bulling down in the hollow road with the So-and-So girl ...'
    My father really loved my mother, and yet I am sure he never mentioned love. As for Mama, I cannot imagine her pronouncing the sentimental phrases one hears in films or reads in novels.
    To Armande I never spoke of love either. One evening when she was dining at the house with my mother and me, we were discussing the colour of the curtains we were going to buy