“What ideas have they been filling your head with, you young girls of today?”

Berthe replied: 

“But marriage is sacred, grandmamma.”

The grandmother’s heart, which had its birth in the great age of gallantry, gave a sudden leap.

“It is love that is sacred,” she said.  “Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long, long experience of men and women.  Marriage and love have nothing in common.  We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society.  Society cannot dispense with marriage.  If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain.  In order to weld those links, we always seek metals of the same order.  When we marry, we must bring together suitable conditions; we must combine fortunes, unite similar races and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children.  We marry only once my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we may love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has made us like this.  Marriage, you see, is law, and love is an instinct which impels us, sometimes along a straight, and sometimes along a devious path.  The world has made laws to combat our instincts—­it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God; while the laws only come from men.  If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible, darling, as we put sugar into drugs for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is.”

Berthe opened her eyes wide in astonishment.  She murmured: 

“Oh! grandmamma, we can only love once.”

The grandmother raised her trembling hands toward Heaven, as if again to invoke the defunct god of gallantries.  She exclaimed indignantly: 

“You have become a race of serfs, a race of common people.  Since the Revolution, it is impossible any longer to recognize society.  You have attached big words to every action, and wearisome duties to every corner of existence; you believe in equality and eternal passion.  People have written poetry telling you that people have died of love.  In my time poetry was written to teach men to love every woman.  And we! when we liked a gentleman, my child, we sent him a page.  And when a fresh caprice came into our hearts, we were not slow in getting rid of the last Lover—­unless we kept both of them.”

The old woman smiled a keen smile, and a gleam of roguery twinkled in her gray eye, the intellectual, skeptical roguery of those people who did not believe that they were made of the same clay as the rest, and who lived as masters for whom common beliefs were not intended.

The young girl, turning very pale, faltered out: 

“So, then, women have no honor?”