XXVII.

OF SUZANNE IN PARTICULAR.

“An exalted, romantic imagination of vivid dreams, peopled with sumptuous hotels, with smart equipages, fetes, balls, rubies, gold and azure.  This is what I have most surely gathered at this school and is called:  a brilliant education.”

  V. SARDOU (Maison Neuve).

But she was a ravishing demon, this child, and more than one saint might have damned himself for her black eyes, those deep limpid eyes which let one read to her soul.  And there one paused perfectly fascinated, for this fresh resplendent soul displayed in large characters the radiant word, Love.

Have you never read this word in a maiden’s two eyes?  Seek in your memory and seek the fairest, and you will have the delightful portrait of Suzanne.

I am unable to say, however, that she was a perfect girl.  What girl is perfect here below?  She had left school, and it would have been a miracle if she were, and we know that away from Lourdes, God works no more miracles.

She had even many faults:  those of her age doubled by those which education gives to girls.  Many a time, when opening the holy Bible, the only book capable of cheering me in the hours of sadness, I have come across these words of Ezekiel,

“They are proud, full of appetites, abounding in idleness.”

It is of the daughters of Sodom that the holy prophet is complaining!  What would he say to-day to the young ladies of our modern Sodoms?

But if the little Suzanne had all the darling faults of forward flowers forced in the warm soil of our enervating education, and our decayed civilization, she was better than many plainer ones, and I do not think that the sum total of her errors could weigh heavy on her conscience.  Perhaps she was culpable in thought; but if the imagination was sick, the heart was good and sound.  She had not sinned, but she said to herself, that sinning would be sweet!

Well! there is no great crime there.  Does not every woman love instinctive pleasure?  Among them there are few stoics.  They who are so, are so by compulsion, and so they cannot make a virtue of it.  Suzanne loved pleasure then, and she loved it the more because she only knew it by hear-say.

The education of Saint-Denis had contributed no little to develop her natural disposition.

Everything has been said about the House of the Legion of Honour, about its curious system of education with regard to young girls, nearly all of them poor, and brought up as if, when they left school, they would find an income of L2,000 a year.