"You have become a race of serfs, a race of common people. Since the Revolution, it is impossible any longer to recognize society. You have attached big words to every action, and wearisome duties to every corner of existence; you believe in equality and eternal passion. People have written verses telling you that people have died of love. In my time verses were written to teach men to love every woman. And we! when we liked a gentleman, my child, we sent him a page. And when a fresh caprice came into our hearts, we were not slow in getting rid of the last lover—unless we kept both of them."
The old woman smiled with a keen smile, and a gleam of roguery twinkled in her gray eye, the sprightly, skeptical roguery of those people who did not believe that they were made of the same clay as the others, and who lived as masters for whom common beliefs were not made.
The young girl, turning very pale, faltered out:
"So then women have no honor?"
The grandmother ceased to smile. If she had kept in her soul some of Voltaire's irony, she had also a little of Jean-Jaques's glowing philosophy: "No honor! because we loved, and dared to say so, and even boasted of it? But, my child, if one of us, among the greatest ladies in France, were to live without a lover, she would have the entire court laughing at her. Those who wished to live differently had only to enter a convent. And you imagine, perhaps, that your husbands will love you alone all their lives. As if, indeed, this could be the case. I tell you that marriage is a thing necessary in order that Society should exist, but it is not in the nature of our race, do you understand? There is only one good thing in life, and that is love. And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it! You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress."
The young girl caught the old woman's trembling hands in her own.
"Hold your tongue, I beg of you, grandmamma!"
And, on her knees, with tears in her eyes, she prayed to Heaven to bestow on her a great passion, one eternal passion alone, in accordance with the dream of modern poets, while the grandmother, kissing her on the forehead, quite penetrated still by that charming, healthy logic by which the philosophers of gallantry sprinkled salt with the life of the eighteenth century, murmured:
"Take care, my poor darling! If you believe in such follies as this, you will be very unhappy."