“No, no, independently of age you are partial.”
“But when none are the same age?”
“What difference does one or two years make? The difference is in your injustice, your deplorable partiality.”
“Do me the favour of helping them yourself. It will be one labour the less for me and for you a pleasant occupation, a splendid opportunity to administer justice in the family. From this time forth I will help them no more.”
“Neither will I.”
⁂
For the honour of the two married people who discoursed so learnedly on distributive justice, it must be remarked that they spoke in German, a language the children did not know. So that for this time at least they had no opportunity of learning that heaven is very far from most families, and that human justice is generally very unjust.
The reader will be grateful to me for not wearying him longer with other sketches taken from real life revealing the matrimonial purgatory. Hell is awful, but it has its dramatic emotions and these offer some compensation for all there is of monstrous, sanguinary, or horrible. Purgatory instead is very small, mean, and deplorably vulgar. There are no ocean storms, but bogs which submerge us inch by inch; no tiger bites, but mosquito stings; no lion’s claws, but the puncture of the flea; no delirium or crime, but secret sobs and silent tears; the continual itching of a scab which heals, forms a crust, and is again broken; an exudation of malignant humours which leak out drop by drop from the marrow of the bones through the tissues, to the skin, and there they remain viscid, fetid, and contagious. This is a true but not very enticing picture of the purgatory of marriage, a hundred times worse than the purgatory of the Catholic Church, which after a longer or shorter time leads to heaven. This other only leads through a long, sorrowful life, to death at the last.