“Well, good-bye, Sabine,” said the duchess; “remember your promise; write to me often.  Calyste, I say nothing more to you, but you understand me.”

Clotilde, leaning on the youngest sister Athenais, who was smiling to the Vicomte de Grandlieu, cast a reflecting look through her tears at the bride, and followed the carriage with her eyes as it disappeared to the clacking of four whips, more noisy than the shots of a pistol gallery.  In a few minutes the gay convoy had reached the esplanade of the Invalides, the barrier of Passy by the quay of the Pont d’Iena, and were fairly on the high-road to Brittany.

Is it not a singular thing that the artisans of Switzerland and Germany, and the great families of France and England should, one and all, follow the custom of setting out on a journey after the marriage ceremony?  The great people shut themselves in a box which rolls along; the little people gaily tramp the roads, sitting down in the woods, banqueting at the inns, as long as their joy, or rather their money lasts.  A moralist is puzzled to decide on which side is the finer sense of modesty,—­that which hides from the public eye and inaugurates the domestic hearth and bed in private, as to the worthy burghers of all lands, or that which withdraws from the family and exhibits itself publicly on the high-roads and in face of strangers.  One would think that delicate souls might desire solitude and seek to escape both the world and their family.  The love which begins a marriage is a pearl, a diamond, a jewel cut by the choicest of arts, a treasure to bury in the depths of the soul.

Who can relate a honeymoon, unless it be the bride?  How many women reading this history will admit to themselves that this period of uncertain duration is the forecast of conjugal life?  The first three letters of Sabine to her mother will depict a situation not surprising to some young brides and to many old women.  All those who find themselves the sick-nurses, so to speak, of a husband’s heart, do not, as Sabine did, discover this at once.  But young girls of the faubourg Saint-Germain, if intelligent, are women in mind.  Before marriage, they have received from their mothers and the world they live in the baptism of good manners; though women of rank, anxious to hand down their traditions, do not always see the bearing of their own lessons when they say to their daughters:  “That is a motion that must not be made;” “Never laugh at such things;” “No lady ever flings herself on a sofa; she sits down quietly;” “Pray give up such detestable ways;” “My dear, that is a thing which is never done,” etc.

Many bourgeois critics unjustly deny the innocence and virtue of young girls who, like Sabine, are truly virgin at heart, improved by the training of their minds, by the habit of noble bearing, by natural good taste, while, from the age of sixteen, they have learned how to use their opera-glasses.  Sabine was a girl of this school, which was also that of Mademoiselle de Chaulieu.  This inborn sense of the fitness of things, these gifts of race made Sabine de Grandlieu as interesting a young woman as the heroine of the “Memoirs of two young Married Women.”  Her letters to her mother during the honeymoon, of which we here give three or four, will show the qualities of her mind and temperament.