tirades all in a breath, and with the most martial air in the world.
“For myself, although I was only six months older than you, I was six years less romantic: one thing chiefly disquieted me, and this was to know what men said among themselves and what they did after leaving drawing- rooms and theatres; I felt that there were many faulty and obscure sides to their lives, which were carefully veiled from our gaze, and which it was very important that we should know. Sometimes hidden behind a curtain, I would watch from a distance the gentlemen who came to the house, and it seemed to me then as if I could distinguish something base and cynical in their manner, a coarse carelessness or a wild preoccupied look, which I could no longer discern in them as soon as they had come in, and which they seemed to lay aside, as by enchantment, on the threshold of the room. All, young as well as old, appeared to me to have uniformly adopted conventional masks, conventional opinions and conventional modes of speech when in the presence of women.
“From the corner of the drawing-room where I used to sit as straight as a doll, without leaning back in my easy-chair, I would listen and look as I rolled my bouquet between my fingers; although my eyes were cast down I could see to right and to left, before me and behind me: like the fabulous eyes of the lynx my eyes could pierce through walls, and I could have told what was going on in the adjoining room.
“I had also perceived a noteworthy difference in the way in which they spoke to married women; they no longer used discreet, polished and childishly embellished phrases such as were addressed to myself or my companions, but displayed bolder sprightliness, less sober and more disembarrassed manners, open reticence, and the ambiguity that quickly comes from a corruption which knows that it has similar corruption before it: I was quite sensible that there existed an element in common between them which did not exist between us, and I would have given anything to know what this element was.
“With what anxiety and furious curiosity I would follow with eye and ear the laughing, buzzing groups of young men, who, after making a halt at some points in the circle, would resume their walk, talking and casting ambiguous glances as they passed. On their scornfully puffed-up lips hovered incredulous sneers; they looked as though they were scoffing at what they had just said, and were retracting the compliments and adoration with which they had overwhelmed us. I could not hear their words; but I knew from the movements of their lips that they were uttering expressions in a language with which I was unacquainted, and of which no one had ever made use in my presence.
“Even those who had the most humble and submissive air would raise their heads with a very perceptible shade of revolt and weariness; a sigh of breathlessness, like that of an actor who has reached the end of a long couplet, would escape from their bosoms in spite of themselves, and when leaving us they would make a half-turn on their heels in an eager, hurried manner which denoted a sort of internal satisfaction at their release from the hard task of being polite and gallant.
“I would have given a year of my life to listen, without being seen, to an hour of their conversation. I could often understand, by certain attitudes, indirect gestures and side-glances, that I was the subject of their conversation, and that they were speaking of my age or my face. Then I would be on burning coals; the few subdued words and partial scraps of sentences reaching me at intervals would excite my curiosity to the highest degree, without being capable of satisfying it, and I would indulge in strange perplexities and doubts.
“Generally, what was said seemed to be favorable to me, and it was not this that disquieted me: I did not care very much about being thought beautiful; it was the slight observations dropped into the hollow of the ear, and nearly always followed by long sneers and singular winkings of the eye, that is what I should have liked to hear; and I would have cheerfully abandoned the most flowery and perfumed conversation in the world to hear one of such expressions as are whispered behind a curtain or in the corner of a doorway.
“If I had had a lover I should have greatly liked to know the way in which he spoke of me to another man, and the terms in which, with a little wine in his head and both elbows on the table-cloth, he would boast of his good fortune to the companions of his orgy.
“I know this now, and in truth I am sorry that I know it. It is always so.
“My idea was a mad one, but what is done is done, and what is learned cannot be unlearned. I did not listen to you, my dear Graciosa, and I am sorry for it; but we do not always listen to reason, especially when It comes from such pretty lips as yours, for, from some reason or other, we can never imagine advice to be wise unless it is given by some old head that is hoary and grey, as though sixty years of stupidity could make one intelligent.
“But all this was too much torment, and I could not stand it; I was broiling in my little skin like a chestnut on the pan. The fatal apple swelled in the foliage above my head, and I was obliged to end by giving it a bite, being free to throw it away afterwards, if the flavor seemed bitter to me.
“I acted like fair Eve, my very dear great-grandmother, and bit it.
“The death of my uncle, the only relation left to me, giving me freedom of action, I put into practice what I had dreamed of for so long. My precautions were taken with the greatest care to prevent any one from suspecting my sex. I had learned how to handle a sword and fire a pistol; I rode perfectly, and with a hardihood of which few horsemen would have been capable; I carefully studied the way to wear my cloak and make my riding-whip crack, and in a few months I succeeded in transforming a girl who was thought rather pretty into a far more pretty cavalier, who lacked scarcely anything but a moustache. I realized my property, and left the town, determined not to return without the most complete experience.
“It was the only means of clearing up my doubts: to have had lovers would have taught me nothing, or would at least have afforded me but incomplete glimpses, and I wished to study man thoroughly, to anatomize him with inexorable scalpel, fibre by fibre, and to have him alive and palpitating on my dissecting table; to do this it would be necessary to see him at home, alone and undressed, and to follow him when he went out walking, and visited the tavern or other places. With my disguise I could go everywhere without being remarked; there would be no concealment before me, all reserve and constraint would be thrown aside, I would receive confidences, and would give false ones to provoke others that were true. Alas! women have read only man's romance and never his history.
“It is a frightful thing to think of, and one which is not thought of, how profoundly ignorant we are of the life and conduct of those who appear to love us, and whom we are going to marry. Their real existence is as completely unknown to us as if they were inhabitants of Saturn or of some other planet a hundred million leagues from our sublunary ball: one would think that they were of a different species, and that there is not the slightest intellectual link between the two sexes; the virtues of the one are the vices of the other, and what excites admiration for a man brings disgrace upon a woman.
“As for us, our life is clear and may be pierced at a glance. It is easy to follow us from our home to the boarding-school, and from the boarding school to our home; what we do is no mystery to anybody; every one may see our bad stump-drawings, our water-color bouquets composed of a pansy and a rose as large as a cabbage, and with the stalk tastefully tied with a bright-colored ribbon: the slippers which we embroider for our father's or grandfather's birthday have nothing very occult and disquieting in them. Our sonatas and ballads are gone through with the most desirable coldness. We are well and duly tied to our mother's apron strings, and at nine or ten o'clock at the latest we retire into our little white beds at the end of our discreet and tidy cells, wherein we are virtuously bolted and padlocked until next morning. The most watchful and jealous susceptibility could find nothing to complain of.
“The most limpid crystal does not possess the transparency of such a life.
“The man who takes us knows what we have done from the minute we were weaned, and even before it if he likes to pursue his researches so far. Our life is not a life, it is a species of vegetation like that of mosses and flowers; the icy shadow of the maternal stem hovers over us, poor, stifled rosebuds who dare not bloom. Our chief business is to keep ourselves very straight, well laced and well brushed, with our eyes becomingly cast down, and for immobility and stiffness to surpass manikins and puppets on springs.
“We are forbidden to speak, or to mingle in the conversation, except to answer yes or no if we are asked a question. As soon as anybody is going to say something interesting we are sent away to practice the harp or harpsichord, and our music-masters are all at least sixty years old, and take snuff horribly. The models hung up in our rooms have a very vague and evasive anatomy. Before the gods of Greece can present themselves in a young ladies' boarding-school they must first purchase very ample box-coats at an old-clothes shop and get themselves engraved in stippling, after which they look like porters or cabmen, and are little calculated to inflame the imagination.
“In the anxiety to prevent us from being romantic we are made idiots. The period of our education is spent not in teaching us something, but in preventing us from learning something.
