A Daughter of Eve | Page 5

Granville loved her daughters sufficiently to wish to
make them angels after the pattern of Marie Alacoque, but the poor
girls themselves would have preferred a less virtuous and more amiable
mother. This education bore its natural fruits. Religion, imposed as a
yoke and presented under its sternest aspect, wearied with formal
practice these innocent young hearts, treated as sinful. It repressed their
feelings, and was never precious to them, although it struck its roots
deep down into their natures. Under such training the two Maries
would either have become mere imbeciles, or they must necessarily
have longed for independence. Thus it came to pass that they looked to
marriage as soon as they saw anything of life and were able to compare
a few ideas. Of their own tender graces and their personal value they

were absolutely ignorant. They were ignorant, too, of their own
innocence; how, then, could they know life? Without weapons to meet
misfortune, without experience to appreciate happiness, they found no
comfort in the maternal jail, all their joys were in each other. Their
tender confidences at night in whispers, or a few short sentences
exchanged if their mother left them for a moment, contained more ideas
than the words themselves expressed. Often a glance, concealed from
other eyes, by which they conveyed to each other their emotions, was
like a poem of bitter melancholy. The sight of a cloudless sky, the
fragrance of flowers, a turn in the garden, arm in arm,--these were their
joys. The finishing of a piece of embroidery was to them a source of
enjoyment.
Their mother's social circle, far from opening resources to their hearts
or stimulating their minds, only darkened their ideas and depressed
them; it was made up of rigid old women, withered and graceless,
whose conversation turned on the differences which distinguished
various preachers and confessors, on their own petty indispositions, on
religious events insignificant even to the "Quotidienne" or "l'Ami de la
Religion." As for the men who appeared in the Comtesse de Granville's
salon, they extinguished any possible torch of love, so cold and sadly
resigned were their faces. They were all of an age when mankind is
sulky and fretful, and natural sensibilities are chiefly exercised at table
and on the things relating to personal comfort. Religious egotism had
long dried up those hearts devoted to narrow duties and entrenched
behind pious practices. Silent games of cards occupied the whole
evening, and the two young girls under the ban of that Sanhedrim
enforced by maternal severity, came to hate the dispiriting personages
about them with their hollow eyes and scowling faces.
On the gloom of this life one sole figure of a man, that of a music-
master, stood vigorously forth. The confessors had decided that music
was a Christian art, born of the Catholic Church and developed within
her. The two Maries were therefore permitted to study music. A
spinster in spectacles, who taught singing and the piano in a
neighboring convent, wearied them with exercises; but when the eldest
girl was ten years old, the Comte de Granville insisted on the

importance of giving her a master. Madame de Granville gave all the
value of conjugal obedience to this needed concession,--it is part of a
devote's character to make a merit of doing her duty.
The master was a Catholic German; one of those men born old, who
seem all their lives fifty years of age, even at eighty. And yet, his
brown, sunken, wrinkled face still kept something infantile and artless
in its dark creases. The blue of innocence was in his eyes, and a gay
smile of springtide abode upon his lips. His iron-gray hair, falling
naturally like that of the Christ in art, added to his ecstatic air a certain
solemnity which was absolutely deceptive as to his real nature; for he
was capable of committing any silliness with the most exemplary
gravity. His clothes were a necessary envelope, to which he paid not
the slightest attention, for his eyes looked too high among the clouds to
concern themselves with such materialities. This great unknown artist
belonged to the kindly class of the self- forgetting, who give their time
and their soul to others, just as they leave their gloves on every table
and their umbrella at all doors. His hands were of the kind that are dirty
as soon as washed. In short, his old body, badly poised on its knotted
old legs, proving to what degree a man can make it the mere accessory
of his soul, belonged to those strange creations which have been
properly depicted only by a German, --by Hoffman, the poet of that
which seems not to exist but yet has life.
Such was Schmucke, formerly chapel-master to the Margrave of
Anspach; a musical