they might have slipped. I was a girl; I came
after the death of three boys; and I vainly strove to take their place
in the hearts of my parents; the wound I gave to the family pride was
never healed. When my gloomy childhood was over and I knew my aunt,
death took her from me all too soon. Monsieur de Mortsauf, to whom I
vowed myself, has repeatedly, nay without respite, smitten me, not being
himself aware of it, poor man! His love has the simple-minded egotism
our children show to us. He has no conception of the harm he does me,
and he is heartily forgiven for it. My children, those dear children
who are bound to my flesh through their sufferings, to my soul by their
characters, to my nature by their innocent happiness,--those children
were surely given to show me how much strength and patience a mother's
breast contains. Yes, my children are my virtues. You know how my heart
has been harrowed for them, by them, in spite of them. To be a mother
was, for me, to buy the right to suffer. When Hagar cried in the desert
an angel came and opened a spring of living water for that poor slave;
but I, when the limpid stream to which (do you remember?) you tried to
guide me flowed past Clochegourde, its waters changed to bitterness for
me. Yes, the sufferings you have inflicted on my soul are terrible. God,
no doubt, will pardon those who know affection only through its pains.
But if the keenest of these pains has come to me through you, perhaps I
deserved them. God is not unjust. Ah, yes, Felix, a kiss furtively taken
may be a crime. Perhaps it is just that a woman should harshly expiate
the few steps taken apart from husband and children that she might walk
alone with thoughts and memories that were not of them, and so walking,
marry her soul to another. Perhaps it is the worst of crimes when the
inward being lowers itself to the region of human kisses. When a woman
bends to receive her husband's kiss with a mask upon her face, that is
a crime! It is a crime to think of a future springing from a death, a
crime to imagine a motherhood without terrors, handsome children playing
in the evening with a beloved father before the eyes of a happy mother.
Yes, I sinned, sinned greatly. I have loved the penances inflicted by
the Church,--which did not redeem the faults, for the priest was too
indulgent. God has placed the punishment in the faults themselves,
committing the execution of his vengeance to the one for whom the faults
were co