A Daughter of Eve | Page 7

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. Of four victims the count saved two.
The countess regarded her sons as too ill-trained to admit of the
slightest intimacy with their sisters. All communication between the
poor children was therefore strictly watched. When the boys came
home from school, the count was careful not to keep them in the house.
The boys always breakfasted with their mother and sisters, but after
that the count took them off to museums, theatres, restaurants, or,
during the summer season, into the country. Except on the solemn days
of some family festival, such as the countess's birthday or New Year's
day, or the day of the distribution of prizes, when the boys remained in
their father's house and slept there, the sisters saw so little of their
brothers that there was absolutely no tie between them. On those days
the countess never left them for an instant alone together. Calls of
"Where is Angelique?"--"What is Eugenie about?"--"Where are my
daughters?" resounded all day. As for the mother's sentiments towards
her sons, the countess raised to heaven her cold and macerated eyes, as
if to ask pardon of God for not having snatched them from iniquity.
Her exclamations, and also her reticences on the subject of her sons,
were equal to the most lamenting verses in Jeremiah, and completely
deceived the sisters, who supposed their sinful brothers to be doomed
to perdition.
When the boys were eighteen years of age, the count gave them rooms
in his own part of the house, and sent them to study law under the
supervision of a solicitor, his former secretary. The two Maries knew
nothing therefore of fraternity, except by theory. At the time of the
marriage of the sisters, both brothers were practising in provincial
courts, and both were detained by important cases. Domestic life in
many families which might be expected to be intimate, united, and
homogeneous, is really spent in this way. Brothers are sent to a distance,
busy with their own careers, their own advancement, occupied, perhaps,

about the good of the country; the sisters are engrossed in a round of
other interests. All the members of such a family live disunited,
forgetting one another, bound together only by some feeble tie of
memory, until, perhaps, a sentiment of pride or self-interest either joins
them or separates them in heart as they already are in fact. Modern laws,
by multiplying the family by the family, has created a great
evil,--namely, individualism.
In the depths of this solitude where their girlhood was spent, Angelique
and Eugenie seldom saw their father, and when he did enter the grand
apartment of his wife on the first floor, he brought with him a saddened
face. In his own home he always wore the grave and solemn look of a
magistrate on the bench. When the little girls had passed the age of
dolls and toys, when they began, about twelve, to use their minds (an
epoch at which they ceased to laugh at Schmucke) they divined the
secret of the cares that lined their father's forehead, and they recognized
beneath that mask of sternness the relics of a kind heart and a fine
character. They vaguely perceived how he had yielded to the forces of
religion in his household, disappointed as he was in his hopes of a
husband, and wounded in the tenderest fibres of paternity,--the love of
a father for his daughters. Such griefs were singularly moving to the
hearts of the two young girls, who were themselves deprived of all
tenderness. Sometimes, when pacing the garden between his daughters,
with an arm round each little waist, and stepping with their own short
steps, the father would stop short behind a clump of trees, out of sight
of the house, and kiss them on