The two Maries, therefore, had no practical knowledge of what it is to have a brother. On the occasion of their sisters’ weddings it happened that both brothers were detained at a distance by important cases: the one having then a post as avocat général2 at a distant Court, while the other was making his first appearance in the provinces. In many families the reality of that home-life, which we are apt to picture as linked together by the closest and most vital ties, is something very different. The brothers are far away, engrossed in moneymaking, in pushing their way in the world, or they are chained to the public service; the sisters are absorbed in a vortex of family interests, outside their own circle. Thus the different members spend their lives apart and indifferent to each other, held together only by the feeble bond of memory. If on occasion pride or self-interest reunites them, just as often these motives act in the opposite sense and divide them in heart, as they have already been divided in life, so that it becomes a rare exception to find a family living in one home and animated by one spirit. Modern legislation, by splitting up the family into units, has created that most hideous evil—the isolation of the individual.
Angélique and Eugénie, amid the profound solitude in which their youth glided by, saw their father but rarely, and it was a melancholy face which he showed in his wife’s handsome rooms on the ground floor. At home, as on the bench, he maintained the grave and dignified bearing of the judge. When the girls had passed the period of toys and dolls, when they were beginning, at twelve years of age, to think for themselves, and had given up making fun of Schmucke, they found out the secret of the cares which lined the Count’s forehead. Under the mask of severity they could read traces of a kindly, lovable nature. He had yielded to the Church his place as head of the household, his hopes of wedded happiness had been blighted, and his father’s heart was wounded in its tenderest spot—the love he bore his daughters. Sorrows such as these rouse strange pity in the breasts of girls who have never known tenderness. Sometimes he would stroll in the garden between his daughters, an arm round each little figure, fitting his pace to their childish steps; then, stopping in the shrubbery, he would kiss them, one after the other, on the forehead, while his eyes, his mouth, and his whole expression breathed the deepest pity.
“You are not very happy, my darlings,” he said on one such occasion; “but I shall marry you early, and it will be a good day for me when I see you take wing.”
“Papa,” said Eugénie, “we have made up our minds to marry the first man who offers.”
“And this,” he exclaimed, “is the bitter fruit of such a system. In trying to make saints of them, they …”
He stopped. Often the girls were conscious of a passionate tenderness in their father’s farewell, or in the way he looked at them when by chance he dined with their mother. This father, whom they so rarely saw, became the object of their pity, and whom we pity we love. The marriage of both sisters—welded together by misfortune, as Rita-Christina was by nature—was the direct result of this strict conventual training. Many men, when thinking of marriage, prefer a girl taken straight from the convent and impregnated with an atmosphere of devotion to one who has been trained in the school of society. There is no medium. On the one hand is the girl with nothing left to learn, who reads and discusses the papers, who has spun round ballrooms in the arms of countless young men, who has seen every play and devoured every novel, whose knees have been made supple by a dancing-master, pressing them against his own, who does not trouble her head about religion and has evolved her own morality; on the other is the guileless, simple girl of the type of Marie-Angélique and Marie-Eugénie. Possibly the husband’s risk is no greater in the one case than in the other, but the immense majority of men, who have not yet reached the age of Arnolphe, would choose a saintly Agnes rather than a budding Célimène.
The two Maries were identical in figure, feet, and hands. Both were small and slight. Eugénie, the younger, was fair like her mother; Angélique, dark like her father. But they had the same complexion—a skin of that mother-of-pearl white which tells of a rich and healthy blood and against which the carnation stands out in vivid patches, firm in texture like the jasmine, and like it also, delicate, smooth, and soft to the touch. The blue eyes of Eugénie, the brown eyes of Angélique, had the same naive expression of indifference and unaffected astonishment, betrayed by the indecisive wavering of the iris in the liquid white. Their figures were good; the shoulders, a little angular now, would be rounded by time. The neck and bosom, which had been so long veiled, appeared quite startlingly perfect in form, when, at the request of her husband, each sister for the first time attired herself for a ball in a low-necked dress. What blushes covered the poor innocent things, so charming in their shamefacedness, as they first saw themselves in the privacy of their own rooms; nor did the color fade all evening!
At the moment when this story opens, with the younger Marie consoling her weeping sister, they are no longer raw girls. Each had nursed an infant—one a boy, the other a girl—and the hands and arms of both were white as milk. Eugénie had always seemed something of a madcap to her terrible mother, who redoubled her watchful care and severity on her behalf. Angélique, stately and
