a few
minutes, so absorbed was I in the bitter reflections that crowded upon
my soul. Dying of grief, yet her children were well? then she died
through me! My conscience uttered one of those arraignments which echo
throughout our lives and sometimes beyond them. What weakness, what
impotence in human justice, which avenges none but open deeds! Why shame
and death to the murderer who kills with a blow, who comes upon you
unawares in your sleep and makes it last eternally, who strikes without
warning and spares you a struggle? Why a happy life, an honored life, to
the murderer who drop by drop pours gall into the soul and saps the body
to destroy it? How many murderers go unpunished! What indulgence for
fashionable vice! What condoning of the homicides caused by moral
wrongs! I know not whose avenging hand it was that suddenly, at that
moment, raised the painted curtain that reveals society. I saw before
me many victims known to you and me,--Madame de Beauseant, dying, and
starting for Normandy only a few days earlier; the Duchesse de Langeais
lost; Lady Brandon hiding herself in Touraine in the little house where
Lady Dudley had stayed two weeks, and dying there, killed by a frightful
catastrophe,--you know it. Our period teems with such events. Who does
not remember that poor young woman who poisoned herself, overcome by
jealousy, which was perhaps killing Madame de Mortsauf? Who has not
shuddered at the fate of that enchanting young girl who perished after
two years of marriage, like a flower torn by the wind, the victim of
her chaste ignorance, the victim of a villain with whom Ronquerolles,
Montriveau, and de Marsay shake hands because he is useful to their
political projects? What heart has failed to throb at the recital of the
last hours of the woman whom no entreaties could soften, and who would
never see her husband after nobly paying his debts? Madame d'Aiglemont
saw death beside her and was saved only by my brother's care. Society
and science are accomplices in crimes for which there are no assizes.
The world declares that no one dies of grief, or of despair; nor yet of
love, of anguish hidden, of hopes cultivated yet fruitless, again and
again replanted yet forever uprooted. Our new scientific nomenclature
has plenty of words to explain these things; gastritis, pericarditis,
all the thousand maladies of women the names of which are whispered in
the ear, all serve as passports to the coffin followed by hypocriti