A Daughter of Eve

mother had been a domestic tyrant; and he could still remember enough of his dismal childhood to descry, through the veil of maidenly modesty, what effect had been produced on a young girl’s character by such a bondage, to see whether she were sulky, soured, and inclined to revolt, or had remained sweet and loving, responsive to the voice of nobler feeling. Tyranny produces two results, exactly opposite in character, and which are symbolized in those two great types of the slave in classical times⁠—Epictetus and Spartacus. The one is hatred with its evil train, the other, meekness with its Christian graces. The Comte de Vandenesse read the history of his life again in Marie-Angélique de Granville. In thus choosing for wife a young girl in her fresh innocence and purity, he had made up his mind beforehand, as befitted a man old in everything but years, to unite paternal with conjugal affection. He was conscious that in him politics and society had blighted feeling, and that he had only the dregs of a used-up life to offer in exchange for one in the bloom of youth. The flowers of spring would be matched with winter frosts, hoary experience with a saucy, impulsive waywardness. Having thus impartially taken stock of his position, he entrenched himself in his married quarters with an ample store of provisions. Indulgence and trust were his two sheet anchors. Mothers with marriageable daughters ought to look out for men of this stamp, men with brains to act as protecting divinity, with worldly wisdom to diagnose like a surgeon, and with experience to take a mother’s place in warding off evil. These are the three cardinal virtues in matrimony.

The refinements and luxuries to which his habits as a man of fashion and of pleasure had accustomed Félix, his training in affairs of state, the insight of a life alternately devoted to action, reflection, and literature; all the resources, in short, at his command were applied intelligently to work out his wife’s happiness.

Marie-Angélique passed at once from the maternal purgatory to the wedded paradise prepared for her by Félix in their house in the Rue du Rocher, where every trifle breathed of distinction at the same time that the conventions of fashion were not allowed to interfere with that gracious spontaneity natural to warm young hearts. She began by enjoying to the full the merely material pleasures of life, her husband for two years acting as majordomo. Félix expounded to his wife very gradually and with great tact the facts of life, initiated her by degrees into the mysteries of the best society, taught her the genealogies of all families of rank, instructed her in the ways of the world, directed her in the arts of dress and conversation, took her to all the theatres, and put her through a course of literature and history. He carried out this education with the assiduity of a lover, a father, a master, and a husband combined; but with a wise discretion he allowed neither amusements nor studies to undermine his wife’s faith. In short, he acquitted himself of his task in a masterly manner, and had the gratification of seeing his pupil, at the end of four years, one of the most charming and striking women of her time.

Marie-Angélique’s feelings towards her husband were precisely such as he wished to inspire⁠—true friendship, lively gratitude, sisterly affection, with a dash of wifely fondness on occasion, not passing the due limits of dignity and self-respect. She was a good mother to her child.

Thus Félix, without any appearance of coercion, attached his wife to himself by all possible ties, reckoning on the force of habit to keep his heaven cloudless. Only men practised in worldly arts and who have run the gamut of disillusion in politics and love, have the knowledge necessary for acting on this system. Félix found in it also the pleasure which painters, authors, and great architects take in their work, while in addition to the artistic delight in creation he had the satisfaction of contemplating the result and admiring in his wife a woman of polished but unaffected manners and an unforced wit, a maiden and a mother, modestly attractive, unfettered and yet bound.

The history of a happy household is like that of a prosperous state; it can be summed up in half a dozen words, and gives no scope for fine writing. Moreover, the only explanation of happiness is the fact that it exists, these four years present nothing but the gray wash of an eternal lovemaking, insipid as manna, and as exciting as the romance of Astraea.

In 1833, however, this edifice of happiness, so carefully put together by Félix, was on the point of falling to the ground; the foundations had been sapped without his knowledge. The fact is, the heart of a woman of five-and-twenty is not that of a girl of eighteen, any more than the heart of a woman of forty is that of one ten years younger. A woman’s life has four epochs, and each epoch creates a new woman. Vandenesse was certainly not ignorant of the laws which determine this development, induced by our modern habits, but he neglected to apply them in his own case. Thus the soundest grammarian may be caught tripping when he turns author; the greatest general on the field of battle, under stress of fire, and at the mercy of the accidents of the ground, will cast to the winds a theoretic rule of military science. The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.

Four years had passed of unruffled calm, four years of tuneful concert without one jarring note. The Countess, under these influences, felt her nature expanding like a healthy plant in good soil under the warm kisses of a sun shining in unclouded azure, and she now began to question her heart.