Nature deceives us all with her endless tricks and devices: she makes us a gift of youth, and then, when we are grown up, asserts her mastery and snares us in a web of relations, domestic and public, most of which we are powerless to control; and, though we impart our personal character to our actions, we do not possess our souls in the same degree; the lyric element of personality is weaker, and, with it, our feelings and capacity for enjoyment—all, indeed, is weaker, except intelligence and will.
§6
My cousin’s life was no bed of roses. She lost her mother in childhood; her father was a passionate gambler, who, like all men who have gambling in their blood, was constantly rich and poor by turns and ended by ruining himself. What was left of his fortune he devoted to his stud, which now became the object of all his thoughts and desires. His only son, a good-natured cavalry officer, was taking the shortest road to ruin: at the age of nineteen, he was a more desperate gambler than his father.
When the father was fifty, he married, for no obvious reason, an old maid who was a teacher in the Smolny Convent. She was the most typical specimen of a Petersburg governess whom I had ever happened to meet: thin, blonde, and very shortsighted, she looked the teacher and the moralist all over. By no means stupid, she was full of an icy enthusiasm in her talk, she abounded in commonplaces about virtue and devotion, she knew history and geography by heart, spoke French with repulsive correctness, and concealed a high opinion of herself under an artificial and Jesuitical humility. These traits are common to all pedants in petticoats; but she had others peculiar to the capital or the convent. Thus she raised tearful eyes to heaven, when speaking of the visit of “the mother of us all” (the Empress, Márya Fyódorovna[[30]]); she was in love with Tsar Alexander, and carried a locket or ring containing a fragment of a letter from the Empress Elizabeth[[31]]—“il a repris son sourire de bienveillance!”
[30]. The wife of Paul and mother of Alexander I and Nicholas.
[31]. Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, reigned from 1741 to 1762. Probably il refers to her father.
It is easy to imagine the harmonious trio that made up this household: a card-playing father, passionately devoted to horses and racing and noisy carouses in disreputable company; a daughter brought up in complete independence and accustomed to do as she pleased in the house; and a middle-aged blue-stocking suddenly converted into a bride. As a matter of course, no love was lost between the stepmother and stepdaughter. In general, real friendship between a woman of thirty-five and a girl of seventeen is impossible, unless the former is sufficiently unselfish to renounce all claim to sex.
The common hostility between stepmothers and step-daughters does not surprise me in the least: it is natural and even moral. A new member of the household, who usurps their mother’s place, provokes repulsion on the part of the children. To them the second marriage is a second funeral. The child’s love is revealed in this feeling, and whispers to the orphan, “Your father’s wife is not your mother.” At one time the Church understood that a second marriage is inconsistent with the Christian conception of marriage and the Christian dogma of immortality; but she made constant concessions to the world, and went too far, till she came up against the logic of facts—the simple heart of the child who revolts against the absurdity and refuses the name of mother to his father’s second choice.
The woman too is in an awkward situation when she comes away from the altar to find a family of children ready-made: she has nothing to do with them, and has to force feelings which she cannot possess; she is bound to convince herself and the world, that other people’s children are just as attractive to her as her own.
Consequently, I don’t blame either the convent-lady or my cousin for their mutual dislike; but I understand how a young girl unaccustomed to control was eager to go wherever she could be free. Her father was now getting old and more submissive to his learned wife; her brother, the officer, was behaving worse and worse; in fact, the atmosphere at home was oppressive, and she finally induced her stepmother to let her go on a visit to us, for some months or possibly for a year.