The young girl took up a newspaper, and cast a rapid glance over it.
“There is a great deal about politics, grandmamma; am I to pass it by?”
“Yes, yes, darling. Are there no accounts of love affairs? Is gallantry, then, dead in France, that they no longer talk about abductions or adventures as they did formerly?”
The girl made a long search through the columns of the newspaper.
“Here is one,” she said. “It is entitled: ‘A Love Drama!’ ”
The old woman smiled through her wrinkles. “Read that for me,” she said.
And Berthe commenced. It was a case of vitriol-throwing. A wife, in order to avenge herself on her husband’s mistress, had burned her face and eyes. She had left the Assize Court acquitted, declared to be innocent, amid the applause of the crowd.
The grandmother moved about excitedly in her chair, and exclaimed:
“This is horrible—why, it is perfectly horrible! See whether you can find anything else to read for me, darling.”
Berthe again made a search; and farther down in police court reports, where she was still looking, she read:
“ ‘Awful Tragedy.’—An ancient virgin had allowed herself to yield to the embraces of a young man. Then, to avenge herself on her lover, whose heart was fickle, and whose allowance was ungenerous, she shot him four times at close range with a revolver. Two bullets had lodged in his chest, one in his shoulder, one in his thigh. The unhappy man would be maimed for life. The lady was acquitted amidst the applause of the crowd, and the newspaper spoke very severely of this seducer of foolish virgins.”
This time the old grandmother appeared quite shocked, and, in a trembling voice, she said:
“Why, you are mad, nowadays. You are mad! The good God has given you love, the only allurement in life. Man has added to this gallantry, the only distraction of our dull hours, and here are you mixing up with it vitriol and revolvers, as if one were to put mud into a flagon of Spanish wine.”
Berthe did not seem to understand her grandmother’s indignation.
“But grandmamma, this woman avenged herself. Remember she was married, and her husband deceived her.”
The grandmother gave a start.
“What ideas have they been filling your head with, you young girls of today?”
Berthe replied:
“But marriage is sacred, grandmamma.”
The grandmother’s heart, which had its birth in the great age of gallantry, gave a sudden leap.
“It is love that is sacred,” she said. “Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long, long experience of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we always seek for metals of the same kind. When we marry, we must bring the same conventions together; we must combine fortunes, unite similar races, and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children. We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we may love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has so made us. Marriage, you see, is law, and love is an instinct, which impels us sometimes along a straight and sometimes along a crooked path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts—it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God, while the laws only come from men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible, darling, as we put sugar into medicines for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is.”
Berthe opened her eyes widely in astonishment. She murmured:
“Oh! grandmamma, we can only love once.”
The grandmother raised her trembling hands towards Heaven, as if again to invoke the defunct God of gallantries. She exclaimed indignantly:
“You have become a race of serfs, a race of common people. Since the Revolution, it is impossible any longer to recognise society. You have attached big words to every action, and wearisome duties to every corner of existence; you believe in equality and eternal passion. People have written verses telling you that people have died of love. In my time verses were written to teach men to love every woman. And we! when we liked a gentleman, my child, we sent him a page. And when a fresh caprice came into our hearts, we were not slow in getting rid of the last lover—unless we kept both of them.”
The young girl, turning very pale, faltered out:
“So then women had no honour?”
The old lady was furious: “No honour! because we loved, and dared to say so, and even boasted of it? But, my child, if one of us, among the greatest ladies in France, had lived without a lover, she would have had the entire court laughing at her. And you imagine, perhaps, that your husbands will love only you all their lives? As if, indeed, that could be the case! I tell you that marriage is a thing necessary in order that Society should exist, but it is not in the nature of our race, do you understand? There is only one good thing in life, and that is love, and they want to deprive us of it. Nowadays you are told: ‘You must love one man only.’ It is as if somebody were to force me to eat turkey only all my life long. But that man is to have as many mistresses as there are months in the year!
“He will follow his amorous instincts, which will drive him towards women as butterflies are attracted by every flower. Then I am to go out into the streets with a bottle of vitriol and blind the poor girls who
