The grandmother ceased to smile.  If she had kept in her soul some of Voltaire’s irony, she had also a little of Jean Jacques’s glowing philosophy:  “No honor! because we loved, and dared to say so, and even boasted of it?  But, my child, if one of us, among the greatest ladies in France, had lived without a lover, she would have had the entire court laughing at her.  Those who wished to live differently had only to enter a convent.  And you imagine, perhaps, that your husbands will love but you alone, all their lives.  As if, indeed, this could be the case.  I tell you that marriage is a thing necessary in order that society should exist, but it is not in the nature of our race, do you understand?  There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.  And how you misunderstand it! how you spoil it!  You treat it as something solemn like a sacrament, or something to be bought, like a dress.”

The young girl caught the old woman’s trembling hands in her own.

“Hold your tongue, I beg of you, grandmamma!”

And, on her knees, with tears in her eyes, she prayed to Heaven to bestow on her a great passion, one sole, eternal passion in accordance with the dream of modern poets, while the grandmother, kissing her on the forehead, quite imbued still with that charming, healthy reason with which gallant philosophers tinctured the thought of the eighteenth century, murmured: 

“Take care, my poor darling!  If you believe in such folly as that, you will be very unhappy.”

FRIEND JOSEPH

They had been great friends all winter in Paris.  As is always the case, they had lost sight of each other after leaving school, and had met again when they were old and gray-haired.  One of them had married, but the other had remained in single blessedness.

M. de Meroul lived for six months in Paris and for six months in his little chateau at Tourbeville.  Having married the daughter of a neighboring, squire, he had lived a good and peaceful life in the indolence of a man who has nothing to do.  Of a calm and quiet disposition, and not over-intelligent he used to spend his time quietly regretting the past, grieving over the customs and institutions of the day and continually repeating to his wife, who would lift her eyes, and sometimes her hands, to heaven, as a sign of energetic assent:  “Good gracious!  What a government!”

Madame de Meroul resembled her husband intellectually as though she had been his sister.  She knew, by tradition, that one should above all respect the Pope and the King!

And she loved and respected them from the bottom of her heart, without knowing them, with a poetic fervor, with an hereditary devotion, with the tenderness of a wellborn woman.  She was good to, the marrow of her bones.  She had had no children, and never ceased mourning the fact.

On meeting his old friend, Joseph Mouradour, at a ball, M. de Meroul was filled with a deep and simple joy, for in their youth they had been intimate friends.