CHAPTER XXX

A PECULIAR AND MOURNFUL SPECTACLE

Women with their feminine pride visit the iniquities of the fools upon the men of sense, and those of the prosaic, prosperous and brutal upon the noble-minded. A very pretty result--you'll agree!

The petty considerations of pride and worldly proprieties are the cause of many women's unhappiness, for, through pride, their parents have placed them in their abominable position. Destiny has reserved for them, as a consolation far superior to all their misfortunes, the happiness of loving and being loved with passion, when suddenly one fine day they borrow from the enemy this same mad pride, of which they were the first victims--all to kill the one happiness which is left them, to work their own misfortune and the misfortune of him, who loves them. A friend, who has had ten famous intrigues (and by no means all one after another), gravely persuades them that if they fall in love, they will be dishonoured in the eyes of the public, and yet this worthy public, who never rises above low ideas, gives them generously a lover a year; because that, it says, "is the thing." Thus the soul is saddened by this odd spectacle: a woman of feeling, supremely refined and an angel of purity, on the advice of a low t----, runs away from the boundless, the only happiness which is left to her, in order to appear in a dress of dazzling white, before a great fat brute of a judge, whom everyone knows has been blind a hundred years, and who bawls out at the top of his voice: "She is dressed in black!"

[Pg 103]