Book excerpt: Elisa's love for her husband is absolute--physically intense and emotionally complete. Gilles is blissfully content with his beautiful wife and family. Neither realizes the fragility of their domestic happiness until an affair develops between Gilles and Elisa's younger sister, Victorine. Deprived of the focus of her existence, Elisa enters an interior world of exquisite anguish, a desperation so profound that she can no longer recognize herself.