It will be seen, from these frank outpourings of the heart, that Madame Guyon was suffering from an overwrought sex-nature.
Steeped in superstition, hypersthenia, God to her was a man—her lover.
Her one thought was to do His will. God is her ideal of all that is strong, powerful and farseeing. In her imagination she continually communicates with this all-powerful man. She calls Him "My Love," and occasionally forgetting herself addresses him as "Sir." She evades her husband, and deceives that worthy gentleman into believing she is asleep when she is all the time secretly praying to God. She goes to confession in a kimono. She gets up at daylight to go to mass, and this mass to her heated imagination is a tryst, and the fact that she can go to mass and get back safely and find her husband still sleeping adds the sweets of secrecy to her passion. In love the illicit seems the normal.
Her children are nothing to her, compared to this love, the ratio of a woman's love for her children having a direct relationship to the mother's love for their father. Madame Guyon's regard for her husband is covered by the word "duty," but to deceive the man never occurs to her as a fault. She prides herself on being an honest wife.
MADAME GUYON
Of course her children turn from her, because she has turned from them. She thinks their ingratitude is a trial and a cross sent to her by God, just as she regards her husband's gout as a calamity for herself, never seemingly thinking of how it affects the gentleman himself. Simple people might say the gout was his affair, not hers, but she does not view it so. In her perverted selfness, all things have relationship to her own ego, and so she is in continual trouble, like a girl whose love is being opposed by parents and kinsmen.
A woman in love is the most unreasonable of all created things—next to a man. Reason is actually beyond a lover's orbit. This woman has lost the focus of truth, and all things are out of perspective. Every object is twisted and distorted by the one thought that fills her life. Lovers are fools, but Nature makes them so.
Here is a woman whose elective affinity is a being of her own creation—an airy, fairy fiction of the mind. When a living man appears upon the scene who in degree approximates her ideal of gentleness, strength and truth, how long, think you, will the citadel of her heart withstand the siege? Or will it be necessary for him to lay siege to her heart at all? Will she not straightway throw the silken net of her personality over him—this personality she affects to despise—and take him captive hand and foot? We shall see: