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VI
Summer had come again. I was in a position to ask
for a few months’ leave, which I purported spending with
my family in the solitude of one of the green islands on
the shores of the Stockholm Archipelago.
I was beginning to reap the harvest of my scientific
researches. My treatise was read by the Académie des
Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in the Institut de France.
I was elected a member of several foreign scientific
societies, and the Imperial Russian Geographical Society
conferred its medal upon me.
At the age of thirty I had won an excellent position in
the literary and scientific world and a brilliant future lay
before me. It was pure happiness to lay my trophies at
Marie’s feet. . . . But she was angry with me because
I had "disturbed the equilibrium." I had to make my-
self small to spare her the humiliation of having to look
up to her husband. Like the good-natured giant in the
fable I allowed her to pull my beard, and as a consequence
she presumed on my good-nature. She took a pleasure
in belittling me before the servants and before her friends
who were on visiting terms with us, especially her women
friends. She gave herself airs ; raised by me on a pedestal,
she posed as my superior, and the more insignificant I
pretended to be, the more she trampled on me. I deliber-
ately fostered in her the delusion that I had to thank
her for my fame, which she did not understand and which
she apparently thought little of. I took a positive delight
in making myself out to be inferior to her. I contented
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