zy. Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was steeped in debt. Later I learned
what it was to have debts, but then I was too utterly ignorant of life
to suspect my position; the money saved out of my fortune went to pacify
my husband's creditors. Monsieur de Maufrigneuse was forty-eight years
of age when I married him; but those years were like military campaigns,
they ought to count for twice what they were. Ah! what a life I led for
ten years! If any one had known the suffering of this poor, calumniated
little woman! To be watched by a mother jealous of her daughter!
Heavens! You who make dramas, you will never invent anything as direful
as that. Ordinarily, according to the little that I know of literature,
a drama is a suite of actions, speeches, movements which hurry to a
catastrophe; but what I speak of was a catastrophe in action. It was an
avalanche fallen in the morning and falling again at night only to
fall again the next day. I am cold now as I speak to you of that cavern
without an opening, cold, sombre, in which I lived. I, poor little thing
that I was! brought up in a convent like a mystic rose, knowing nothing
of marriage, developing late, I was happy at first; I enjoyed the
goodwill and harmony of our family. The birth of my poor boy, who is
all me--you must have been struck by the likeness? my hair, my eyes, the
shape of my face, my mouth, my smile, my teeth!--well, his birth was a
relief to me; my thoughts were diverted by the first joys of maternity
from my husband, who gave me no pleasure and did nothing for me that
was kind or amiable; those joys were all the keener because I knew no
others. It had been so often rung into my ears that a mother should
respect herself. Besides, a young girl loves to play the mother. I was
so proud of my flower--for Georges was beautiful, a miracle, I thought!
I saw and thought of nothing but my son, I lived with my son. I never
let his nurse dress or undress him. Such cares, so wearing to mothers
who have a regiment of children, were all my pleasure. But after three
or four years, as I was not an actual fool, light came to my eyes in
spite of the pains taken to blindfold me. Can you see me at that
final awakening, in 1819? The drama of 'The Brothers at enmity' is a
rose-water tragedy beside that of a mother and daughter placed as we
then were. But I braved them all, my mother, my husband, the world,
by public coquetries which society talked of,--and heaven knows how it
talked! You