“Yes, monsieur, come back again. Thank you for your thought of me.”
“Very well, madame; then I shall return very shortly.”
This visit relaxed the tension of soul, as it were; the heavy strain of grief and loneliness had been almost too much for the Marquise’s strength. The priest’s visit had left a soothing balm in her heart, his words thrilled through her with healing influence. She began to feel something of a prisoner’s satisfaction, when, after he has had time to feel his utter loneliness and the weight of his chains, he hears a neighbor knocking on the wall, and welcomes the sound which brings a sense of human friendship. Here was an unhoped-for confidant. But this feeling did not last for long. Soon she sank back into the old bitterness of spirit, saying to herself, as the prisoner might say, that a companion in misfortune could neither lighten her own bondage nor her future.
In the first visit the curé had feared to alarm the susceptibilities of self-absorbed grief, in a second interview he hoped to make some progress towards religion. He came back again two days later, and from the Marquise’s welcome it was plain that she had looked forward to the visit.
“Well, Mme. la Marquise, have you given a little thought to the great mass of human suffering? Have you raised your eyes above our earth and seen the immensity of the universe?—the worlds beyond worlds which crush our vanity into insignificance, and with our vanity reduce our sorrows?”
“No, monsieur,” she said; “I cannot rise to such heights, our social laws lie too heavily upon me, and rend my heart with a too poignant anguish. And laws perhaps are less cruel than the usages of the world. Ah! the world!”
“Madame, we must obey both. Law is the doctrine, and custom the practice of society.”
“Obey society?” cried the Marquise, with an involuntary shudder. “Eh! monsieur, it is the source of all our woes. God laid down no law to make us miserable; but mankind, uniting together in social life, have perverted God’s work. Civilization deals harder measure to us women than nature does. Nature imposes upon us physical suffering which you have not alleviated; civilization has developed in us thoughts and feelings which you cheat continually. Nature exterminates the weak; you condemn them to live, and by so doing, consign them to a life of misery. The whole weight of the burden of marriage, an institution on which society is based, falls upon us; for the man liberty, duties for the woman. We must give up our whole lives to you, you are only bound to give us a few moments of yours. A man, in fact, makes a choice, while we blindly submit. Oh, monsieur, to you I can speak freely. Marriage, in these days, seems to me to be legalized prostitution. This is the cause of my wretchedness. But among so many miserable creatures so unhappily yoked, I alone am bound to be silent, I alone am to blame for my misery. My marriage was my own doing.”
She stopped short, and bitter tears fell in the silence.
“In the depths of my wretchedness, in the midst of this sea of distress,” she went on, “I found some sands on which to set foot and suffer at leisure. A great tempest swept everything away. And here am I, helpless and alone, too weak to cope with storms.”