Half lying on a sofa, her handkerchief in the other hand, her
breathing choked by repressed sobs, and with tearful eyes, the
countess had been making confidences such as are made only from sister
to sister when two sisters love each other; and these two sisters did
love each other tenderly. We live in days when sisters married into
such antagonist spheres can very well not love each other, and
therefore the historian is bound to relate the reasons of this tender
affection, preserved without spot or jar in spite of their husbands'
contempt for each other and their own social disunion. A rapid glance
at their childhood will explain the situation.
Brought up in a gloomy house in the Marais, by a woman of narrow mind,
a "devote" who, being sustained by a sense of duty (sacred phrase!),
had fulfilled her tasks as a mother religiously, Marie-Angelique and
Marie Eugenie de Granville reached the period of their marriage--the
first at eighteen, the second at twenty years of age--without ever
leaving the domestic zone where the rigid maternal eye controlled
them. Up to that time they had never been to a play; the churches of
Paris were their theatre. Their education in their mother's house had
been as rigorous as it would have been in a convent. From infancy they
had slept in a room adjoining that of the Comtesse de Granville, the
door of which stood always open.
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