e same order. When we marry, we must bring together
suitable conditions; 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 made us like this.
Marriage, you see, is law, and love is an instinct which impels us,
sometimes along a straight, and sometimes along a devious 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 drugs for children, nobody would care to
take it just as it is."

Berthe opened her eyes wide in astonishment. She murmured:

"Oh! grandmamma, we can only love once."

The grandmother raised her trembling hands toward 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 recognize 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 poetry telling you that people have died of love. In my time
poetry was 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 old woman smiled a keen smile, and a gleam of roguery twinkled in
her gray eye, the intellectual, skeptical roguery of those people who
did not believe that they were made of the same clay as the rest, and
who lived as masters for whom common beliefs were not intended.

The young girl, turning very pale, faltered out:

"So, then, women have no honor?"

The grandmother ceased to smile. If she had kept in her soul some
of Voltaire's irony, she had also a little of Jean Jacques's glowing
philosophy: "No honor! 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. Those who wished to live differently h