What woman,
however innocent, does not desire to excite envy?
No dangerous idea, unhealthy or even equivocal, soiled the pure pulp
of their brain; their hearts were innocent, their hands were horribly
red, and they glowed with health. Eve did not issue more innocent from
the hands of God than these two girls from their mother's home when
they went to the mayor's office and the church to be married, after
receiving the simple but terrible injunction to obey in all things two
men with whom they were henceforth to live and sleep by day and by
night. To their minds, nothing could be worse in the strange houses
where they were to go than the maternal convent.
Why did the father of these poor girls, the Comte de Granville, a wise
and upright magistrate (though sometimes led away by politics),
refrain from protecting the helpless little creatures from such
crushing despotism? Alas! by mutual understanding, about ten years
after marriage, he and his wife were separated while living under one
roof. The father had taken upon himself the education of his sons,
leaving that of the daughters to his wife. He saw less danger for
women than for men in the application of his wife's oppressive system.
The two Maries, destined as women to endure tyranny, either of love or
marriage, would be, he thought, less injured than boys, whose minds
ought to have freer play, and whose manly qualities would deteriorate
under the powerful compression of religious ideas pushed to their
utmost consequences.
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