The grandmother ceased to smile. If she had kept
in her soul some of Voltaire’s irony, she had
also a little of Jean Jacques’s glowing philosophy:
“No honor! because we loved, and dared to say
so, and even boasted of it? But, my child, if
one of us, among the greatest ladies in France, had
lived without a lover, she would have had the entire
court laughing at her. Those who wished to live
differently had only to enter a convent. And
you imagine, perhaps, that your husbands will love
but you alone, all their lives. As if, indeed,
this could be the case. I tell you that marriage
is a thing necessary in order that society should exist,
but it is not in the nature of our race, do you understand?
There is only one good thing in life, and that is
love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil
it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament,
or something to be bought, like a dress.”
The young girl caught the old woman’s trembling
hands in her own.
“Hold your tongue, I beg of you, grandmamma!”
And, on her knees, with tears in her eyes, she prayed
to Heaven to bestow on her a great passion, one sole,
eternal passion in accordance with the dream of modern
poets, while the grandmother, kissing her on the forehead,
quite imbued still with that charming, healthy reason
with which gallant philosophers tinctured the thought
of the eighteenth century, murmured:
“Take care, my poor darling! If you believe
in such folly as that, you will be very unhappy.”
They had been great friends all winter in Paris.
As is always the case, they had lost sight of each
other after leaving school, and had met again when
they were old and gray-haired. One of them had
married, but the other had remained in single blessedness.
M. de Meroul lived for six months in Paris and for
six months in his little chateau at Tourbeville.
Having married the daughter of a neighboring, squire,
he had lived a good and peaceful life in the indolence
of a man who has nothing to do. Of a calm and
quiet disposition, and not over-intelligent he used
to spend his time quietly regretting the past, grieving
over the customs and institutions of the day and continually
repeating to his wife, who would lift her eyes, and
sometimes her hands, to heaven, as a sign of energetic
assent: “Good gracious! What a government!”
Madame de Meroul resembled her husband intellectually
as though she had been his sister. She knew,
by tradition, that one should above all respect the
Pope and the King!
And she loved and respected them from the bottom of
her heart, without knowing them, with a poetic fervor,
with an hereditary devotion, with the tenderness of
a wellborn woman. She was good to, the marrow
of her bones. She had had no children, and never
ceased mourning the fact.
On meeting his old friend, Joseph Mouradour, at a
ball, M. de Meroul was filled with a deep and simple
joy, for in their youth they had been intimate friends.
