And so, by reason of thus keeping her before his eyes and in his mind, he became possessed of such an inordinate desire of having her to wife that he asked her hand in marriage.
He was well to do, owning his vessel, his nets, and a house on the Retenue down by the end of the beach, while Father Auban had nothing. He was consequently accepted with avidity, and the wedding was celebrated at the earliest moment possible, both sides, for different reasons of their own, being desirous to have the matter over and ended.
When he had been married three days, however, Patin did not understand at all how he could ever have believed that Désirée was different from other women. True as gospel, he must have been a blockhead to saddle himself with a woman as poor as a church mouse, who had bewitched him with her brandy, that was as plain as a pikestaff, with brandy in which she had put some unclean nostrum to addle his brain. And he swore, and he swore, at all times of the tide, and he smashed his pipe between his teeth, and he blew up his crew; and when he had ripped and stormed, up hill and down, with all the hard words in the dictionary and against everything that he could think of, he would expectorate what bile was left in his stomach upon the fishes and the lobsters as he took them from the nets, one by one, and never consigned them to the hampers without a running accompaniment of insult and unseemly language.
Then when he got home, where his wife, old Auban's daughter, was at the mercy of his tongue and fist, it was not long before he began to treat her as the lowest of the low. Then, as she endured it all with
