“If you knew the supreme peace in which I live after having lifted myself by thought above the petty interests of the world, and how exquisite is the feeling of having done one’s duty, in accordance with your noble motto, you would enter on your happy life with a firm step, nor glance behind nor around you. So I am writing to beseech you to be true to yourself and to your family.
“My dear, the society in which you must live cannot exist without the religion of duty; and you will misunderstand life, as I have misunderstood it, if you give yourself up to passion and to fancy as I have done. Woman can only be equal with man by making her life a perpetual sacrifice, as man’s must be perpetual action. Now my life has been, as it were, one long outbreak of egoism. God perhaps brought you in its evening to my door, as a messenger charged with my punishment and pardon. Remember this confession from a woman to whom fame was a pharos whose light showed her the right way. Be great! sacrifice your fancy to your duties as the head of a house, as husband and father. Raise the downtrodden banner of the old du Guénics; show the present age, when principles and religion are denied, what a gentleman may be in all his glory and distinction.
“Dear child of my soul, let me play the mother a little: the angelic Fanny will not be jealous of a woman dead to the world, of whom you will henceforth know nothing but that her hands are always raised to Heaven. In these days the nobility need fortune more than ever, so accept a part of mine, dear Calyste, and make a good use of it. It is not a gift; it is trust-money. I am thinking more of your children and your old Breton estate than of yourself when I offer you the interest which time has accumulated for me on my Paris property.”
“I am ready to sign,” said the young Baron, to the great delight of the assembly.
Part III
Retrospective Adultery
The week after this, when the marriage service had been celebrated at Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, at seven in the morning—as was the custom in some families of the Faubourg Saint-Germain—Calyste and Sabine got into a neat traveling-carriage in the midst of the embracing, congratulations, and tears of a score of persons gathered in groups under the awning of the Hôtel de Grandlieu. The congratulations were offered by the witnesses and the men; the tears were to be seen in the eyes of the Duchesse de Grandlieu and her daughter Clotilde—both tremulous, and from the same reflection.
“Poor Sabine! she is starting in life at the mercy of a man who is married not altogether willingly.”
Marriage does not consist solely of pleasures, which are as fugitive under those conditions as under any others; it involves a consonance of tempers and physical sympathies, a concord of character, which make this social necessity an ever new problem. Girls to be married know the conditions and dangers of this lottery fully as well as their mothers do; this is why women shed tears as they look on at a marriage, while men smile; the men think they risk nothing; the women know pretty well how much they risk.
In another carriage, which had started first, was the Baronne du Guénic, to whom the Duchess had said at parting:
“You are a mother though you have only a son. Try to fill my place to my darling Sabine.”
On the box of that carriage sat a groom serving as a courier, and behind it two ladies’-maids. The four postilions, in splendid liveries—each carriage having four horses—all had nosegays in their buttonholes and favors in their hats. The Duc de Grandlieu, even by paying them, had the greatest difficulty in persuading them to remove the ribbons. The French postilion is eminently intelligent, but he loves his joke; and these took the money, and replaced the favors outside the city walls.
“Well, well, goodbye, Sabine!” said the Duchess. “Remember your promise, and write often.—Calyste, I say no more, but you understand me.”
Clotilde, leaning on the arm of her youngest sister Athénaïs, who was smiling at the Vicomte Juste de Grandlieu, gave the bride a keen glance through her tears, and watched the carriage till it disappeared amid the repeated salvo of four postilions’ whips, noisier than pistol shots. In a very short time the gay procession reached the Esplanade of the Invalides, followed the Quay to the Pont d’Iéna, the Passy Gate, the Versailles avenue, and, finally, the highroad to Brittany.
Is it not strange, to say the least, that the artisan class of Switzerland and Germany, and the greatest families of France and England, obey the same custom, and start on a journey after the nuptial ceremony? The rich pack themselves into a box on wheels. The poor walk gaily along the roads, resting in the woods, feeding at every inn, so long as their glee, or rather their money, holds out. A moralist would find it difficult to decide which is the finest flower of modesty—that which hides from the public eye, inaugurating the domestic hearth and bed as the worthy citizen does, or that which flies from the family and displays itself in the fierce light of the highroad to the eyes of strangers? Refined natures must crave for solitude, and avoid the world
