Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/395

 trial it was decided that I was a deceived husband and that I had killed her, while defending my honour (that is what they call it). And so they acquitted me. At the trial I endeavoured to explain things, but they understood me as wishing to rehabilitate my wife's honour.

"Her relations with the musician, whatever they may have been, have no meaning for me, nor for her either. But what has a meaning is that which I have told you about, that is, my swinishness. Everything happened because there was between us that terrible abyss of which I have told you, that terrible tension of mutual hatred, when the first cause was sufficient to produce a crisis. Our quarrels became toward the end something terrible, and were very startling, alternating with tense animal passion.

"If he had not appeared, another man would have. If there had not been the excuse of jealousy, there would have been something else. I insist that all men who live as I did must either take to debauch, or separate, or kill themselves, or their wives, just as I did. If this has not happened with them, it must be taken as an extremely rare exception. Even I have been, before ending as I did, several times on the brink of suicide, and she, too, had several times almost poisoned herself.