means to some, and a poesy to others. Devotion causes a moral
ophthalmia. By some providential grace, it takes from souls on the road
to eternity the sight of many little earthly things. In a word, pious
persons, devotes, are stupid on various points. This stupidity proves
with what force they turn their minds to celestial matters; although the
Voltairean Chevalier de Valois declared that it was difficult to decide
whether stupid people became naturally pious, or whether piety had the
effect of making intelligent young women stupid. But reflect upon this
carefully: the purest catholic virtue, with its loving acceptance of all
cups, with its pious submission to the will of God, with its belief in
the print of the divine finger on the clay of all earthly life, is the
mysterious light which glides into the innermost folds of human history,
setting them in relief and magnifying them in the eyes of those who
still have Faith. Besides, if there be stupidity, why not concern
ourselves with the sorrows of stupidity as well as with the sorrows of
genius? The former is a social element infinitely more abundant than the
latter.

So, then, Mademoiselle Cormon was guilty in the eyes of the world of the
divine ignorance of virgins. She was no observer, and her behavior with
her suitors proved it. At this very moment, a young girl of sixteen, who
had never opened a novel, would have read a hundred chapters of a love
story in the eyes of Athanase Granson, where Mademoiselle Cormon saw
absolutely nothing. Shy herself, she never suspected shyness in others;
she did not recognize in the quavering tones of his speech the force of
a sentiment he could not utter. Capable of inventing those refinements
of sentimental grandeur which hindered her marriage in her early years,
she yet could not recognize them in Athanase. This moral phenomenon will
not seem surprising to persons who know that the qualities of the heart
are as distinct from those of the mind as the faculties of genius are
from the nobility of soul. A perfect, all-rounded man is so rare
that Socrates, one of the noblest pearls of humanity, declared (as a
phrenologist of that day) that he was born to be a scamp, and a very
bad one. A great general may save his country at Zurich, and take
commissions from purveyors. A great musician may conceive the sublimest
music and commit a forgery. A woman of true feeling may be a fool. In
short, a devote may have a sublime soul and yet be unabl