The two Maries were not taken to a ball until they were sixteen years of age, and then only four times a year in special houses.  They were not allowed to leave their mother’s side without instructions as to their behavior with their partners; and so severe were those instructions that they dared say only yes or no during a dance.  The eye of the countess never left them, and she seemed to know from the mere movement of their lips the words they uttered.  Even the ball-dresses of these poor little things were piously irreproachable; their muslin gowns came up to their chins with an endless number of thick ruches, and the sleeves came down to their wrists.  Swathing in this way their natural charms, this costume gave them a vague resemblance to Egyptian hermae; though from these blocks of muslin rose enchanting little heads of tender melancholy.  They felt themselves the objects of pity, and inwardly resented it.  What woman, however innocent, does not desire to excite envy?

No dangerous idea, unhealthy or even equivocal, soiled the pure pulp of their brain; their hearts were innocent, their hands were horribly red, and they glowed with health.  Eve did not issue more innocent from the hands of God than these two girls from their mother’s home when they went to the mayor’s office and the church to be married, after receiving the simple but terrible injunction to obey in all things two men with whom they were henceforth to live and sleep by day and by night.  To their minds, nothing could be worse in the strange houses where they were to go than the maternal convent.

Why did the father of these poor girls, the Comte de Granville, a wise and upright magistrate (though sometimes led away by politics), refrain from protecting the helpless little creatures from such crushing despotism?  Alas! by mutual understanding, about ten years after marriage, he and his wife were separated while living under one roof.  The father had taken upon himself the education of his sons, leaving that of the daughters to his wife.  He saw less danger for women than for men in the application of his wife’s oppressive system.  The two Maries, destined as women to endure tyranny, either of love or marriage, would be, he thought, less injured than boys, whose minds ought to have freer play, and whose manly qualities would deteriorate under the powerful compression of religious ideas pushed to their utmost consequences.  Of four victims the count saved two.

The countess regarded her sons as too ill-trained to admit of the slightest intimacy with their sisters.  All communication between the poor children was therefore strictly watched.  When the boys came home from school, the count was careful not to keep them in the house.  The boys always breakfasted with their mother and sisters, but after that the count took them off to museums, theatres, restaurants, or, during the summer season, into the country.  Except on the solemn days of some family festival, such as the