Free Act of Passion by Georges Simenon Page B

world, she remained.
    When it comes to fatalities like this, to inescapable things, it seems as if every one were in a hurry to be fate's accomplice and went out of the way to humour her.
    From the very first days my friends fell into the habit of asking me:
    'How is Armande?'
    And it seemed to them perfectly normal for her to be living in my house, and for them to be coming to me to inquire about her.
    After two weeks, during which the disease ran its natural course, people would say with the same artlessness which nevertheless implied so much:
    'She is an amazing woman.'
    As though, you understand, they considered that she belonged to me already. Even my mother ... I've talked to you enough about Mama for you to know her by this time. To get her son married, that was all very well, since I had not chosen to be a priest... But on the express condition that the house should remain hers and that she should continue to run it as she saw fit...
    Well, your Honour, believe it or not, my mother was the first to say, while after all Armande was in our house only in the capacity of a volunteer nurse, one evening when I expressed surprise at the peas being cooked in a way they had never been before:
    'I asked Armande how she liked them. This is the recipe she gave me. Don't you like them?'
    Armande called me Charles right away and it was she who asked me to call her by her first name. She was not coquettish. I never saw her, even after we were married, dressed in any but a rather strict way, and I remember a remark I heard about her: 'Mme Alavoine is a statue, if a statue could walk.' Even after Anne-Marie was well again, she continued to come to the house almost every day. As Mama had very little time to go out with the children, she would call for them and take them for a walk in the gardens of the Prefecture. My mother used to say to me: 'She is very fond of your daughters.' One of my patients made a faux pas: 'I just ran into your wife and your little girls at the corner of the Rue de la République.'
    And Anne-Marie, when we were all together at table one day, said very gravely:
    'But, Mama, Armande said so .. .' By the time we were married six months later, she had already been reigning over the house and the family for a very long time, and it would not have been surprising if the townspeople in speaking of me had said, not:
    'That is Dr Alavoine,'
    But:
    'That is Mme Armande's future husband .. .'
    Have I the right to claim that I did not want to marry her? I acquiesced. First of all there were my two daughters.
    'They will be so happy to have a mother...'
    Mama was beginning to get old and, refusing to admit it, bustled about from morning to night, wearing herself out at her task.
    But no - let's be absolutely sincere. If not, your Honour, what's the use of writing to you at all? I can sum up in two words my state of mind at the time:
    First: cowardice.
    Second: vanity.
    Cowardice because I did not have the courage to say no. Everybody was against me. Everybody by a kind of tacit agreement encouraged the marriage.
    But, for this woman who was so amazing, I felt not the least sexual desire. I had felt no particular desire for Jeanne, my first wife, either, but at that time I was young, I married for the sake of being married. In marrying her I did not know that she would leave a large part of me unsatisfied and that all my life I should be tormented by the desire to be unfaithful to her.
    With Armande, I knew it. I am going to confess something absurd. Suppose that conventions and wordly wisdom did not exist. I would much rather have married Laurette than the daughter of M. Hilaire dc Lanusse.
    What's more, I should have preferred our little servant girl Lucile, with whom I sometimes had intercourse without even giving her time to put down the shoe she happened to be polishing and which she had to keep in her hand, very comically, the whole time.
    Only, I was just beginning to practise in the city. I was living in a handsome