No dangerous idea,unhealthy or even equivocal,soiled the pure pulp of their brain;their hearts were innocent,their hands were horribly red,and they glowed with health.Eve did not issue more innocent from the hands of God than these two girls from their mother's home when they went to the mayor's office and the church to be married,after receiving the simple but terrible injunction to obey in all things two men with whom they were henceforth to live and sleep by day and by night.To their minds,nothing could be worse in the strange houses where they were to go than the maternal convent.
Why did the father of these poor girls,the Comte de Granville,a wise and upright magistrate (though sometimes led away by politics),refrain from protecting the helpless little creatures from such crushing despotism?Alas!by mutual understanding,about ten years after marriage,he and his wife were separated while living under one roof.The father had taken upon himself the education of his sons,leaving that of the daughters to his wife.He saw less danger for women than for men in the application of his wife's oppressive system.
The two Maries,destined as women to endure tyranny,either of love or marriage,would be,he thought,less injured than boys,whose minds ought to have freer play,and whose manly qualities would deteriorate under the powerful compression of religious ideas pushed to their utmost consequences.Of four victims the count saved two.
The countess regarded her sons as too ill-trained to admit of the slightest intimacy with their sisters.All communication between the poor children was therefore strictly watched.When the boys came home from school,the count was careful not to keep them in the house.The boys always breakfasted with their mother and sisters,but after that the count took them off to museums,theatres,restaurants,or,during the summer season,into the country.Except on the solemn days of some family festival,such as the countess's birthday or New Year's day,or the day of the distribution of prizes,when the boys remained in their father's house and slept there,the sisters saw so little of their brothers that there was absolutely no tie between them.On those days the countess never left them for an instant alone together.Calls of "Where is Angelique?"--"What is Eugenie about?"--"Where are my daughters?"resounded all day.As for the mother's sentiments towards her sons,the countess raised to heaven her cold and macerated eyes,as if to ask pardon of God for not having snatched them from iniquity.
Her exclamations,and also her reticences on the subject of her sons,were equal to the most lamenting verses in Jeremiah,and completely deceived the sisters,who supposed their sinful brothers to be doomed to perdition.
When the boys were eighteen years of age,the count gave them rooms in his own part of the house,and sent them to study law under the supervision of a solicitor,his former secretary.The two Maries knew nothing therefore of fraternity,except by theory.At the time of the marriage of the sisters,both brothers were practising in provincial courts,and both were detained by important cases.Domestic life in many families which might be expected to be intimate,united,and homogeneous,is really spent in this way.Brothers are sent to a distance,busy with their own careers,their own advancement,occupied,perhaps,about the good of the country;the sisters are engrossed in a round of other interests.All the members of such a family live disunited,forgetting one another,bound together only by some feeble tie of memory,until,perhaps,a sentiment of pride or self-interest either joins them or separates them in heart as they already are in fact.Modern laws,by multiplying the family by the family,has created a great evil,--namely,individualism.