Priests, Women, and Families

by Jules Michelet

"But you tremble, you dare not tell this terrible God your weakness and childishness; well! tell them to your father; a father has a right to know the secrets of his child. He is an indulgent father, who wants to know them only to absolve them. He is a sinner like yourself: has he then a right to be severe? Come, then, my child, come and tell me—what you have not dared to whisper in your mother's ear; tell it me; who will ever know?"

Then is it, amid sobs and sighs, from the choking heaving breast that the fatal word rises to the lips: it escapes, and she hides her head. Oh! he who heard that has gained an immense advantage, and will keep it. Would to God that he did not abuse it! It was heard, remember, not by the wood and the dark oak of the confessional, but by ears of flesh and blood.

And this man now knows of this woman, what the husband has not known in all the long effusion of his heart by day and night, what even her own mother does not know, who thinks she knows her entirely, having had her so many times a naked infant upon her knees.

This man knows, and will know—don't be afraid of his forgetting it. If the confession is in good hands, so much the better, for it is for ever. And she, she knows full well she has a master of her intimate thoughts. Never will she pass by that man without casting down her eyes.

The day when this mystery was imparted, he was very near her, she felt it. On a higher seat, he seemed to have an irresistible ascendency over her. A magnetic influence has vanquished her, for she wished not to speak, and she spoke in spite of herself. She felt herself fascinated, like the bird by the serpent.

So far, however, there is no art on the side of the priest. The force of circumstances has done everything, that of religious institution, and that of nature. As a priest, he received her at his knees, and listened to her. Then, master of her secret, of her thoughts, the thoughts of a woman, he became man again, without, perhaps, either wishing or knowing it, and laid upon her, weakened and disarmed, the heavy hand of man.

And her family now? her husband? Who will dare to assert that his position is the same as before?

Every reflecting mind knows full well that thought is the most personal part of the person. The master of a person's thoughts is he to whom the person belongs. The priest has the soul fast, as soon as he has received the dangerous pledge of the first secrets, and he will hold it faster and faster. The two husbands now take shares, for now there are two—one has the soul, the other the body.

Take notice that in this sharing, one of the two really has the whole; the other, if he gets anything, gets it by favour. Thought by its nature is prevailing and absorbing; the master of her thought, in the natural progress of his sway, will ever go on reducing the part that seemed to remain in the possession of the other. The husband may think himself well off, if a widower with respect to the soul, he still preserves the involuntary, inert, and lifeless possession.

How humiliating, to obtain nothing of what was your own, but by authorisation and indulgence;[[1]] to be seen, and followed into your most private intimacy, by an invisible witness, who governs you and gives you your allowance; to meet in the street a man who knows better than yourself your most secret weaknesses, who bows cringingly, turns and laughs. It is nothing to be powerful, if one is not powerful alone—alone! God does not allow shares.