But it was not like that. The jealous man suffers from an excessive sense of possessiveness; he suspects continually that some other man wishes to get possession of his woman, and this haunting suspicion gives rise to extravagant imaginings and may even lead him to crime. On the other hand, I suffered because I loved Cecilia (for it had now become a question of love); and my aim in spying upon her was to make certain that she was deceiving me, not indeed to punish her or in any way prevent her from continuing in her unfaithfulness, but in order to set myself free both from my love and from her. The jealous man tends, in spite of himself, to shackle himself in his own servitude; I, on the contrary, wished to release myself from this same servitude, and I saw no other means of attaining my object than by destroying Cecilia’s independence and mystery, thus reducing her, through a more exact knowledge of her treacherous conduct, to something well known and ordinary and insignificant. My first thought was to make use of the telephone.
