Juana | Page 8

idea,
person, name and power of a father had been completely unknown
since the thirteenth century. The name Marana was to her what the
designation of Stuart is to the celebrated royal race of Scotland, a name
of distinction substituted for the patronymic name by the constant
heredity of the same office devolving on the family.
Formerly, in France, Spain, and Italy, when those three countries had,
in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mutual interests which united
and disunited them by perpetual warfare, the name Marana served to
express in its general sense, a prostitute. In those days women of that
sort had a certain rank in the world of which nothing in our day can
give an idea. Ninon de l'Enclos and Marian Delorme have alone played,
in France, the role of the Imperias, Catalinas, and Maranas who, in
preceding centuries, gathered around them the cassock, gown, and
sword. An Imperia built I forget which church in Rome in a frenzy of
repentance, as Rhodope built, in earlier times, a pyramid in Egypt. The
name Marana, inflicted at first as a disgrace upon the singular family
with which we are now concerned, had ended by becoming its veritable
name and by ennobling its vice by incontestable antiquity.
One day, a day of opulence or of penury I know not which, for this
event was a secret between herself and God, but assuredly it was in a
moment of repentance and melancholy, this Marana of the nineteenth
century stood with her feet in the slime and her head raised to heaven.
She cursed the blood in her veins, she cursed herself, she trembled lest
she should have a daughter, and she swore, as such women swear, on
the honor and with the will of the galleys--the firmest will, the most
scrupulous honor that there is on earth--she swore, before an altar, and
believing in that altar, to make her daughter a virtuous creature, a saint,
and thus to gain, after that long line of lost women, criminals in love,
an angel in heaven for them all.
The vow once made, the blood of the Maranas spoke; the courtesan
returned to her reckless life, a thought the more within her heart. At last
she loved, with the violent love of such women, as Henrietta Wilson

loved Lord Ponsonby, as Mademoiselle Dupuis loved Bolingbroke, as
the Marchesa Pescara loved her husband--but no, she did not love, she
adored one of those fair men, half women, to whom she gave the
virtues which she had not, striving to keep for herself all that there was
of vice between them. It was from that weak man, that senseless
marriage unblessed by God or man which happiness is thought to
justify, but which no happiness absolves, and for which men blush at
last, that she had a daughter, a daughter to save, a daughter for whom to
desire a noble life and the chastity she had not. Henceforth, happy or
not happy, opulent or beggared, she had in her heart a pure, untainted
sentiment, the highest of all human feelings because the most
disinterested. Love has its egotism, but motherhood has none. La
Marana was a mother like none other; for, in her total, her eternal
shipwreck, motherhood might still redeem her. To accomplish sacredly
through life the task of sending a pure soul to heaven, was not that a
better thing than a tardy repentance? was it not, in truth, the only
spotless prayer which she could lift to God?
So, when this daughter, when her Marie-Juana-Pepita (she would fain
have given her all the saints in the calendar as guardians), when this
dear little creature was granted to her, she became possessed of so high
an idea of the dignity of motherhood that she entreated vice to grant her
a respite. She made herself virtuous and lived in solitude. No more
fetes, no more orgies, no more love. All joys, all fortunes were centred
now in the cradle of her child. The tones of that infant voice made an
oasis for her soul in the burning sands of her existence. That sentiment
could not be measured or estimated by any other. Did it not, in fact,
comprise all human sentiments, all heavenly hopes? La Marana was so
resolved not to soil her daughter with any stain other than that of birth,
that she sought to invest her with social virtues; she even obliged the
young father to settle a handsome patrimony upon the child and to give
her his name. Thus the girl was not know as Juana Marana, but as
Juana di Mancini.
Then, after seven years of joy, and kisses, and intoxicating happiness,
the time came when the poor Marana deprived herself of her idol. That
Juana might never bow her head