l; their judgments are
Rhadamanthine.

For young women of the Marquise d'Aiglemont's age, this first, this most
poignant pain of all, is always referable to the same cause. A woman,
especially if she is a young woman, greatly beautiful, and by nature
great, never fails to stake her whole life as instinct and sentiment and
society all unite to bid her. Suppose that that life fails her, suppose
that she still lives on, she cannot but endure the most cruel pangs,
inasmuch as a first love is the loveliest of all. How comes it that this
catastrophe has found no painter, no poet? And yet, can it be painted?
Can it be sung? No; for the anguish arising from it eludes analysis
and defies the colors of art. And more than this, such pain is never
confessed. To console the sufferer, you must be able to divine the past
which she hugs in bitterness to her soul like a remorse; it is like an
avalanche in a valley; it laid all waste before it found a permanent
resting-place.

The Marquise was suffering from this anguish, which will for long remain
unknown, because the whole world condemns it, while sentiment cherishes
it, and the conscience of a true woman justifies her in it. It is with
such pain as with children steadily disowned of life, and therefore
bound more closely to the mother's heart than other children more
bounteously endowed. Never, perhaps, was the awful catastrophe in which
the whole world without dies for us, so deadly, so complete, so cruelly
aggravated by circumstance as it had been for the Marquise. The man whom
she had loved was young and generous; in obedience to the laws of the
world, she had refused herself to his love, and he had died to save a
woman's honor, as the world calls it. To whom could she speak of her
misery? Her tears would be an offence against her husband, the origin
of the tragedy. By all laws written and unwritten she was bound over to
silence. A woman would have enjoyed the story; a man would have schemed
for his own benefit. No; such grief as hers can only weep freely in
solitude and in loneliness; she must consume her pain or be consumed by
it; die or kill something within her--her conscience, it may be.

Day after day she sat gazing at the flat horizon. It lay out before her
like her own life to come. There was nothing to discover, nothing to
hope. The whole of it could be seen at a glance. It was the visible
presentment in the outward world of the chill sense of desolation which
was gnawi