"But grandmamma, this woman avenged herself. Remember she was married, and her husband deceived her."
The grandmother gave a start.
"What ideas have they been filling your head with, you young girls of to-day?"
Berthe replied:
"But marriage is sacred, grandmamma."
The grandmother's heart, which had its birth in the great age of gallantry, gave a sudden leap.
"It is love that is sacred," she said, "Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long, long experience of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we always seek for metals of the same kind. When we marry, we must bring together suitable conditions; we must combine fortunes, unite similar races, and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children. We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we may love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has made us like this. Marriage, you see, is law, and love is an instinct, which impels us sometimes along a straight and sometimes along a crooked path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts—it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God, while the laws only come from men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible, darling, as we put sugar into drugs for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is."
Berthe opened her eyes widely in astonishment. She murmured:
"Oh! grandmamma, we can only love once."
The grandmother raised her trembling hands towards Heaven, as if again to invoke the defunct God of gallantries. She exclaimed indignantly: