“You, of course, cannot recollect the amazing revolution that swept over Europe when I was a young man—that upheaval of everything old, accepted, and conventional, which was confined to no one country, but raged equally throughout them all. Huxley, Darwin, Haeckel, Renan, and Herbert Spencer were names that grew familiar by incessant repetition; young ladies whom one remembered last in boxes at the opera, or surrounded by admirers at balls and great assemblies, now threw themselves passionately into this new Renaissance. One you would find studying higher mathematics; another geology and chemistry; another still, teaching the children of thieves and cut-throats how to read. Girls you had seen at their father’s table, with downcast eyes and blushes when one spoke to them, now demanded separate establishments of their own; worked their way, if necessary, through foreign universities; fought like little tigers for the privilege of studying till two in the morning and starving with one another in the gloomiest parts of the town. Nor were the young men behind their sisters: to them also had come the new revelation, this self-denying and austere standard of life, this religion of violent intellectual effort. To many it was ennobling to a supreme degree; and while our girls boldly made their way into avenues hitherto closed to women, there were everywhere young men, no less ardent and disinterested, to support them in the mêlée. In every house there was this revolt of the young against the old, this perpetual argument of humanitarianism against apathy and laisser-faire.
“To me it all seemed the most frightful madness. I was bewildered to see bright eyes pursuing studies which I knew myself to be so wearisome, taking joy where I had found only vexation and fatigue. Like all my caste, I was old-fashioned and thought a woman’s place at home. You must not go to the army for new ideas. It was no pleasure to me to see delicately nurtured ladies rubbing shoulders with raw medical students or tainting their pretty ears with the unrestrained conversation of men. You must remember how things have changed in eighteen years; you can scarcely conceive the position of those forerunners of your sex in Europe, so much has public opinion altered for the better. In my day we went to extremes on either side, for it was then that the battle was fought. The elders would not give way an inch; the children dashed into a thousand extravagances. To some it looked as though the dissolution of society was at hand. Girls asked men to marry them,—men they had seen perhaps but once,—in order that they might gain the freedom accorded to married women and secure themselves against the intolerable interference of their families. Some of them never saw their husbands again, nor could even recollect their names without an effort. Ah, it was frightful! It was a revolution!
“In spite of all her liberal opinions, her unconventional views, her apparent allegiance to the new religion, my mother soon took her place amid the reactionary ranks, while my sister, the mondaine, just as surely joined the rebellion. As I said before, it was the battle of the young against the old; age, rather than conviction, assigned one’s position in the fight. Our house, hitherto so free from domestic discord, became the theatre of furious quarrels between mother and daughter—quarrels not about gowns, allowances, suitors, or unpaid bills, but involving questions abstract and sublime: one’s liberty of free development; one’s duty to one’s self, to mankind; one’s obligation, in fact, to cast off all shackles and take one’s place in the revolution so auspiciously beginning.
“The end of it was that Berthe left Nemours, coming to Paris without my mother’s permission, to study medicine with a Russian friend of hers, a girl as defiant and undaunted as herself. This was Sonia Boremykin, with whose name you must be familiar. Needless to say, I was interdicted from giving any assistance to my sister, my mother imploring me not to supply the means by which Berthe’s ruin might be accomplished. But I could not allow my sister to starve to death in a garret, and if I disobeyed my poor mother, she had at least the satisfaction of knowing that my sympathies were on her side of the quarrel. My greatest distress, indeed, was that Berthe would accept so little, for she was crazy to be a martyr, and was, besides, prompted by a generous feeling not to take a sou more than the meagre earnings of her companion. So they lived and starved together, these two remarkable young women, turning their backs on every luxury and refinement. Either, for the asking, could have received a thousand-franc note within the hour; for each a château stood with open doors; for each there was a dowry of more than respectable dimensions, and lovers who would have been glad to take them for their beaux yeux alone! And yet they chose to live in a garret, to be constantly affronted as they went unescorted through the wickedest parts of Paris, to subsist on food the most unappetising and unwholesome. For what? To cut up dead paupers in the Sorbonne!
“I was often there to see them with the self-imposed task of trying to lighten the burden of their sacrifices. I introduced food in paper bags, and surreptitiously dropped napoleons in dark corners—that is, until I was once detected. Afterwards they watched me like hawks. Sometimes they were so hungry that tears came into their eyes at the sight of what I brought; at others they would appear insulted, and throw it remorselessly out of the window. Though I had no sympathy whatever with their aims, I was profoundly interested, profoundly touched, as one might be at the sight of an heroic enemy. Their convictions were not my convictions; their mode of life I thought detestable: but who could withhold admiration for so much courage, so much self-denial, in two beautiful young women? I used often to bring with me my old colonel, a glorious veteran with whom I was always a favourite, and the girls liked to hear our sabres clank as we mounted the grimy stair, and to see our brilliant uniforms in their garret. It reminded them of the monde they had resigned; besides, they needed an audience of their own caste who could appreciate, as none other, their sacrifices and their fortitude. Mademoiselle Sonia used to look very kindly at me on the occasion of my visits, never growing angry, as my sister did, at my stupidity, or by my failure to understand their high-flown notions of duty. Once, when I was accidentally hurt at the salle d’armes by a button coming off my opponent’s foil, it was she who dressed my wound with the greatest tenderness and skill, converting me for all time as to the medical career for women. Poor Sonia, how her eyes sparkled at her little triumph!
“On one of my visits I was thunderstruck to find before me the Marquis de Gonse, a gentleman much older than myself, with whom I had not actual acquaintance, though we had a host of friends in common. Upon his departure I protested vehemently against this outrage of the proprieties. I besought them to show a little more circumspection in their choice of friends, admitting no man to their intimacy who counted not his fifty years. But my protestations were received with laughter; I was told that the marquis was a friend of Sonia’s father, and was trying to effect a reconciliation highly to be desired. Berthe accused me mockingly of wishing to keep the little Russian to myself. Indeed, she said, what could be more demoralising to her companion than the constant presence of a beautiful young hussar? With her saucy tongue she put me completely to the blush; in vain I pleaded and argued; de Gonse’s footing was assured. Yet, if they had searched all Paris, they could not have found a man more undesirable, or more dangerous for two young women to know. Ardent, generous, and himself full of aspirations for the advancement of humanity, nothing was better calculated to appeal to him than the struggle in which my sister was engaged. His sympathy, his sincere desire to put his own shoulder to the wheel, were more to be feared than the most strenuous protestations of regard. If he had made love to my sister, she was enough a woman of the world to have sent him to the right about; but he adopted, all unconsciously, I am sure, a more subtle plan to win her good opinion: he was converted!
“If I shut my eyes I can see him sitting there in that low garret as he appeared on one occasion which particularly imprinted itself on my mind; such a high-bred, such a distinguished figure, with his silk hat and gloves beside the box which had been given him for a chair, and his face full of wonder and sadness! You have read of Marie Antoinette in prison, of her sufferings so uncomplainingly borne, of her nobility and steadfastness in the squalor of her cell! You have revolted, perhaps, at the picture—clinched your little fists and felt a great bursting of the heart? It was thus with M. de Gonse. Berthe he had often seen at our château in Nemours; Sonia’s father he had known in Russia, a general of reputation, standing high in the favour of the Czar. None was better aware than he of what the young ladies had given up. I could see that he was deeply moved. He asked many questions; at times he exclaimed beneath his breath. He insisted on learning everything—the amount of their income, the nature of their studies, all their makeshifts and contrivances. The two beautiful, solitary girls, from whom sympathy and appreciation had so long been withheld, unbared their lives to us without reserve. Berthe told us, amid the passionate interjections of Sonia Boremykin, the story of their struggles at the medical school: the open hostility of the professors; the brutal sneers and innuendoes; the indescribable affronts that had been put upon them. During this terrible recital—for it was terrible to hear of outrages so patiently borne, of insults which bring the blood to the cheek even to remember after all these years—de Gonse rose more than once from his seat, walking up and down like one possessed, uttering cries of rage and pity. It was no feigned anger, no play-acting to win the regard of these poor women. Let me do the man that justice.
“I don’t think my sister was prepared for the effect of her eloquence on the marquis, or could have foreseen, even for a moment, the tempest she had raised within his breast. He swore he would challenge every professor in the school; that he would unloose spadassins on the offending students, whose bones should be broken with clubs; that to blight their careers in after life he would make his business, his pleasure, his joy! It was with difficulty that he was recalled to the realities of every-day existence, my sister telling him frankly that such a course as he proposed might benefit woman in general, but could not fail to destroy the future of herself and Sonia Boremykin. To be everywhere talked about, to get their names into the newspapers, to be pointed at on the street as the victims of frightful insults—what could be more detestable, more ruinous to the careers they hoped to make? De Gonse was reluctantly compelled to withdraw his plans of extermination; for who could controvert the logic with which they were demolished or fail to see the justice of my sister’s contention? Confessing himself beaten on this point, he sought for some other solution of the problem. Private tutors? Intolerably expensive, came the answer; poor substitutes for one of the greatest schools in Europe; unable, besides, to confer the longed-for degree. The University of Geneva, famous for its generous treatment of women? Good, but its diploma would not carry the desired prestige in France. I hazarded boys’ clothes and false mustaches; but my remark was greeted with a shout of laughter and a half-blushing confession from Mademoiselle Sonia that one experiment in this direction had sufficed. It was to the marquis that light finally came.
“‘Fool! Idiot!’ he thundered, striking himself on his handsome forehead with his fist. ‘Why did I not think of it before? To-morrow I join the medical school myself—the student de Gonse, cousin of the marquis, a man tired of the hollowness and the trivialities of high life. I do nothing to show I am acquainted with you, nothing to compromise you in the faintest manner. But de Gonse, the medical student, is a gentleman, a man of honour. A companion ventures on a remark derogatory to the dignity of the young ladies; behold, his head cracks like an egg against his desk! Another opens his mouth, only to discover that le boxe (you know I am quite an Anglais) is driving the teeth down his throat, setting up medical complications of an extraordinary and baffling nature. A professor so far forgets his manhood as to heap insults on the undefended; the strange medical student tweaks his nose in the tribune and challenges him to combat! How simple, how direct!’
“Imagine my surprise a few days later to learn that this had been no idle gasconade on the marquis’s part. True to his word, he had appeared at the school elaborately attired for the part he was to play, even to a detestable cravat and a profusion of cheap jewellery! Unquestionably there must have been others in the plot, for no formalities anywhere tied his hands or opposed the least obstacle to his audacity. As one would have expected from a man so eager and so full of resource, the object for which he came was soon achieved. Mingling with the students as one of themselves, he singled out those who went the farthest in persecuting the women, and insensibly cajoled them into a better way of conduct. The minority, too, those that still kept alive the chivalry of young France, were strengthened and encouraged by the force of his example, so that the crusade, once authoritatively begun, went on magnificently of itself. Not a blow was struck, not a wry word said, and behold, de Gonse had accomplished a miracle! From that time the position of women was assured; protectors arose on every side as though by magic; in a word, gallantry became the fashion. When professors ventured on impertinences, hisses now greeted them in place of cheers; they changed colour, and were at pains to explain away their words. The battle, indeed, was won.