Chapter 24:
Could one be married to a man for thirteen years and not know what his mind and his body were doing? Hervé had come in the other night, from that carnival, with a kind of uneasy swagger. He had checked in the doorway, under her eye; then, subdued, had sat down and begun taking off his shoes without a word. Neither of them had said anything as they went to bed. But just before going to sleep Hervé had stretched himself and sighed, a sigh of pure animal contentment. Plenty of her friends, Marie-Ange thought, would have been glad enough if their men found a whore somewhere and let them alone. A girl's blood runs hot at eighteen, they would say; but ask her again, ten years later, ten children later, how long love lasts! Plenty of others, whose blood still had life in it, would have been eager to give the devil their souls in return for having him knock the idea of contraception into their husbands' heads.... Only she, Marie-Ange Kirouac, did not know her luck and was a fool. Fool, to be afraid of the priest; fool, to refuse her husband; then, when he took another woman as he inevitably must, fool to cry. Fool to ache wretchedly with wanting him, beating her hands together to still the need in them. "Does he think I have no desires?" she said harshly aloud in the empty house, trying to get rid of her pain by turning it into anger against Hervé. But she could not make herself blame him. Marie-Ange was not a jealous woman; she would have said that jealousy was for the idle, for the Etatsuniennes who had no work to do. Her trouble today was the image of Hervé as a lover, as the lover of some unimportant carnival whore; it roused her more than she could bear.