"
"Is that your sole unhappiness?"
"My only one, but it is great enough, for it condemns me to eternal
anxiety, to eternal dissimulation. It condemns me to feign a love
which I do not feel, to endure caresses which make me shudder,
because they are an inheritance from five unfortunate women. Jane,
Jane, do you comprehend what it is to be obliged to embrace a man
who has murdered three wives and put away two? to be obliged to kiss
this king whose lips open just as readily to utter vows of love as
sentences of death? Ah, Jane, I speak, I live, and still I suffer
all the agonies of death! They call me a queen, and yet I tremble
for my life every hour, and conceal my anxiety and fear beneath the
appearance of happiness! My God, I am five-and-twenty, and my heart
is still the heart of a child; it does not yet know itself, and now
it is doomed never to learn to know itself; for I am Henry's wife,
and to love another is, in other words, to wish to mount the
scaffold. The scaffold! Look, Jane. When the king approached me and
confessed his love and offered me his hand, suddenly there rose
before me a fearful picture. It was no more the king whom I saw
before me, but the hangman; and it seemed to me that I saw three
corpses lying at his feet, and with a loud scream I sank senseless
before him. When I revived, the king was holding me in his arms. The
shock of this unexpected good fortune, he thought, had made me
faint. He kissed me and called me his bride; he thought not for a
moment that I could refuse him.
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