Page:Calvary mirbeau.djvu/23

Rh things and animals; as a young girl she was given to love of dreams of the impossible, but material objects never brought her peace, nor did her dreams assume a precise and soothing form. She had no one to guide her, no one to set right this youthful mind already shaken by internal shocks, no one to open the door of this heart to wholesome reality, a door already guarded by chimeric shadows in her vacant state; no one to whom she could pour out the exuberance of her thoughts, her tenderness, her desires, which finding no outlet for expansion, accumulated, boiled within her, ready to burst the fragile mould poorly protected by nerves too jaded.

Her mother, always ill, singularly absorbed in that hypochondria which was soon to kill her, was incapable of intelligent and firm direction in the matter of her daughter's education. Her father, all but ruined, put to his last shift, struggled hard to save for his family its ancestral home which was threatened; and among the young people about her—shiftless noblemen, vainglorious burghers, greedy peasants, none bore upon his brow the magic star which could lead her to her God. Everything she heard, everything she saw seemed to be in disagreement with her own manner of understanding and feeling. To her, the sun did not appear red enough, the nights pale enough, the skies deep enough. Her fleeting conception of things and beings condemned her fatally to a perversion of her senses, to vagaries of the spirit and left her nothing but the torment of an unachieved longing, the torture of unfulfilled desires. And later her marriage which had been more than a sacrifice—a business transaction, a compromise to improve the straitened circumstances of her father! . . . And her disgust, her revolt at feeling herself a piece of dishonored flesh, a prey, an instrument of man's pleasure! To have