It was half-past eleven in the evening, and two women were seated by the fire of a boudoir in one of the finest houses of the Rue Neuve-des-Mathurins. The room was hung in blue velvet, of the kind with tender melting lights, which French industry has only lately learned to manufacture. The doors and windows had been draped by a really artistic decorator with rich cashmere curtains, matching the walls in color. From a prettily moulded rose in the centre of the ceiling, hung, by three finely wrought chains, a silver lamp, studded with turquoises. The plan of decoration had been carried out to the very minutest detail; even the ceiling was covered with blue silk, while long bands of cashmere, folded across the silk at equal distances, made stars of white, looped up with pearl beading. The feet sank in the warm pile of a Belgian carpet, close as a lawn, where blue nosegays were sprinkled over a ground the color of unbleached linen. The warm tone of the furniture, which was of solid rosewood and carved after the best antique models, saved from insipidity the general effect which a painter might have called wanting in “accent.” On the chair backs small panels of splendid broche silk⁠—white with blue flowers⁠—were set in broad leafy frames, finely cut on the wood. On either side of the window stood a set of shelves, loaded with valuable knickknacks, the flower of mechanical art, sprung into being at the touch of creative fancy. The mantelpiece of African marble bore a platinum timepiece with arabesques in black enamel, flanked by extravagant specimens of old Dresden⁠—the inevitable shepherd with dainty bouquet forever tripping to meet his bride⁠—embodying the Teutonic conception of ceramic art. Above sparkled the beveled facets of a Venetian mirror in an ebony frame, crowded with figures in relief, relic of some royal residence. Two flower-stands displayed at this season the sickly triumphs of the hothouse, pale, spirit-like blossoms, the pearls of the world of flowers. The room might have been for sale, it was so desperately tidy and prim. It bore no impress of will and character such as marks a happy home, and even the women did not break the general chilly impression, for they were weeping.

The proprietor of the house, Ferdinand du Tillet, was one of the richest bankers in Paris, and the very mention of his name will account for the lavish style of the house decoration, of which the boudoir may be taken as a sample. Du Tillet, though a man of no family and sprung from Heaven knows where, had taken for wife, in 1831, the only unmarried daughter of the Comte de Granville, whose name was one of the most illustrious on the French bench, and who had been made a peer of the realm after the Revolution of July. This ambitious alliance was not got for nothing; in the settlement, du Tillet had to sign a receipt for a dowry of which he never touched a penny. This nominal dowry was the same in amount as the huge sum given to the elder sister on her marriage with Comte Félix de Vandenesse, and which, in fact, was the price paid by the Granvilles in their turn for a matrimonial prize. Thus, in the long run, the bank repaired the breach which aristocracy had made in the finances of the bench. Could the Comte de Vandenesse have seen himself, three years in advance, brother-in-law of a Master Ferdinand, self-styled du Tillet, it is possible he might have declined the match; but who could have foreseen at the close of 1828 the strange upheavals which 1830 was to produce in the political, financial, and moral condition of France? Had Count Félix been told that in the general shuffle he would lose his peer’s coronet, to find it again on his father-in-law’s brow, he would have treated his informant as a lunatic.

Crouching in a listening attitude in one of those low chairs called a chauffeuse, Mme. du Tillet pressed her sister’s hand to her breast with motherly tenderness, and from time to time kissed it. This sister was known in society as Mme. Félix de Vandenesse, the Christian name being joined to that of the family, in order to distinguish the Countess from her sister-in-law, wife of the former ambassador, Charles de Vandenesse, widow of the late Comte de Kergarouët, whose wealth she had inherited, and by birth a de Fontaine. The Countess had thrown herself back upon a lounge, a handkerchief in her other hand, her eyes swimming, her breath choked with half-stifled sobs. She had just poured out her confidences to Mme. du Tillet in a way which proved the tenderness of their sisterly love. In an age like ours it would have seemed so natural for sisters, who had married into such very different spheres, not to be on intimate terms, that a rapid glance at the story of their childhood will be necessary in order to explain the origin of this affection which had survived, without jar or flaw, the alienating forces of society and the mutual scorn of their husbands.

The early home of Marie-Angélique and Marie-Eugénie was a dismal house in the Marais. Here they were brought up by a pious but narrow-minded woman, “imbued with high principle,” as the classic phrase has it, who conceived herself to have performed the whole duty of a mother when her girls arrived at the door of matrimony without ever having traveled beyond the domestic circle embraced by the maternal eye. Up to that time they had never even been to a play. A Paris church was their nearest approach to a theatre. In short, their upbringing in their mother’s house was as strict as it could have been in a convent. From the time that they had ceased to be mere infants they always slept in a room adjoining that of the Countess, the door of which was kept open at night. The time not occupied by dressing, religious observances, and the minimum of study requisite for the children of gentlefolk, was spent in making poor-clothes and in taking exercise, modeled on the English Sunday walk, where any quickening of the solemn pace is checked as being suggestive of cheerfulness. Their lessons were kept within the limits imposed by confessors, chosen from among the least liberal and most Jansenist of ecclesiastics. Never were girls handed over to their husbands more pure and virgin: in this point, doubtless one of great importance, their mother seemed to have seen the fulfilment of her whole duty to God and man. Not a novel did the poor things read till they were married. In drawing an old maid was their instructor, and their only copies were figures whose anatomy would have confounded Cuvier, and so drawn as to have made a woman of the Farnese Hercules. A worthy priest taught them grammar, French, history, geography, and the little arithmetic a woman needs to know. As for literature, they read aloud in the evening from certain authorized books, such as the Lettres édifiantes and Noël’s Leçons de littérature, but only in the presence of their mother’s confessor, since even here passages might occur, which, apart from heedful commentary, would be liable to stir the imagination. Fénelon’s Telemachus was held dangerous. The Comtesse de Granville was not without affection for her daughters, and it showed itself in wishing to make angels of them in the fashion of Marie Alacoque, but the daughters would have preferred a mother less saintly and more human.

This education bore its inevitable fruit. Religion, imposed as a yoke and presented under its harshest aspect, wearied these innocent young hearts with a discipline adapted for hardened sinners. It repressed their feelings, and, though striking deep root, could create no affection. The two Maries had no alternative but to sink into imbecility or to long for independence. Independence meant marriage, and to this they looked as soon as they began to see something of the world and could exchange a few ideas, while yet remaining utterly unconscious of their own touching grace and rare qualities. Ignorant of what innocence meant, without arms against misfortune, without experience of happiness, how should they be able to judge of life? Their only comfort in the depths of this maternal jail was drawn from each other. Their sweet whispered talks at night, the few sentences they could exchange when their mother left them for a moment, contained sometimes more thoughts than could be put in words. Often would a stolen glance, charged with sympathetic message and response, convey a whole poem of bitter melancholy. They found a marvelous joy in simple things⁠—the sight of a cloudless sky, the scent of flowers, a turn in the garden with interlacing arms⁠—and would exult with innocent glee over the completion of a piece of embroidery.

Their mother’s friends, far from providing intellectual stimulus or calling forth their sympathies, only deepened the surrounding gloom. They were stiff-backed old ladies, dry and rigid, whose conversation turned on their ailments, on the shades of difference between preachers or confessors, or on the most trifling events in the religious world, which might be found in the pages of La Quotidienne or L’Ami de la Religion. The men again might have served as extinguishers to the torch of love, so cold and mournfully impassive were their faces. They had all reached the age when a man becomes churlish and irritable, when his tastes are blunted except at table, and are directed only to procuring the comforts of life. Religious egotism had dried up hearts devoted to task work and entrenched behind routine. They spent the greater part of the evening over silent card-parties. At times the two poor little girls, placed under the ban of this sanhedrim, who abetted the maternal severity, would suddenly feel that they could bear no longer the sight of these wearisome persons with their sunken eyes and frowning faces.

Against the dull background of this life stood out in bold relief the single figure of a man, that of their music-master. The confessors had ruled that music was a Christian art, having its source in the Catholic church and developed by it, and therefore the two little girls were allowed to learn music. A spectacled lady, who professed sol-fa and the piano at a neighboring convent, bored them for a time with exercises. But, when the elder of the girls was ten years old, the Comte de Granville pointed out the necessity of finding a master.

Mme. de Granville, who could not deny it, gave to her concession all the merit of wifely submissiveness. A pious woman never loses an opportunity of taking credit for doing her duty.

The master was a Catholic German, one of those men who are born old and will always remain fifty, even if they live to be eighty. His hollowed, wrinkled, swarthy face had kept something childlike and simple in its darkest folds. The blue of innocence sparkled in his eyes, and the gay smile of spring dwelt on his lips. His gray old hair, which fell in natural curls, like those of Jesus Christ, added to his ecstatic air a vague solemnity which was highly misleading, for he was a man to make a fool of himself with the most exemplar gravity. His clothes were a necessary envelope to which he paid no attention, for his gaze soared too high in the clouds to come in contact with material things. And so this great unrecognized artist belonged to that generous race of the absentminded, who give their time and their hearts to others, just as they drop their gloves on every table, their umbrellas at every door. His hands were of the kind which look dirty after washing. Finally, his aged frame, badly set up on tottering, knotty limbs, gave ocular proof how far a man’s body can become a mere accessory to his mind. It was one of those strange freaks of nature which no one has ever properly described except Hoffmann, a German, who has made himself the poet of all which appears lifeless and yet lives. Such was Schmucke, formerly choirmaster to the Margrave of Anspach, a learned man who underwent inspection from a council of piety. They asked him whether he fasted. The master was tempted to reply, “Look at me!” but it is ill work jesting with saints and Jansenist confessors.

This apocryphal old man held so large a place in the life of the two Maries⁠—they became so much attached to the great simple-minded artist whose sole interest was in his art⁠—that, after they were married, each bestowed on him an annuity of three hundred francs, a sum which sufficed for his lodging, his beer, his pipe, and his clothes. Six hundred francs a year and his lessons were a Paradise for Schmucke. He had not ventured to confide his poverty and his hopes to anyone except these two charming children, whose hearts had blossomed under the snow of maternal rigor and the frost of devotion, and this fact by itself sums up the character of Schmucke and the childhood of the two Maries.

No one could tell afterwards what abbé, what devout old lady, had unearthed this German, lost in Paris. No sooner did mothers of a family learn that the Comtesse de Granville had found a music-master for her daughters than they all asked for his name and address. Schmucke had thirty houses in the Marais. This tardy success displayed itself in slippers with bronze steel buckles and lined with horsehair soles, and in a more frequent change of shirt. His childlike gaiety, long repressed by an honorable and seemly poverty, bubbled forth afresh. He let fall little jokes such as:⁠—“Young ladies, the cats supped off the dirt of Paris last night,” when a frost had dried the muddy streets overnight, only they were spoken in a Germano-Gallic lingo:⁠—“Younc ladies, de gads subbed off de dirt off Barees.” Gratified at having brought his adorable ladies this species of Vergiss mein nicht, culled from the flowers of his fancy, he put on an air of such ineffable roguishness in presenting it that mockery was disarmed. It made him so happy to call a smile to the lips of his pupils, the sadness of whose life was no mystery to him, that he would have made himself ridiculous on purpose if nature had not saved him the trouble. And yet there was no commonplace so vulgar that the warmth of his heart could not infuse it with fresh meaning. In the fine words of the late Saint-Martin, the radiance of his smile might have turned the mire of the highway to gold. The two Maries, following one of the best traditions of religious education, used to escort their master respectfully to the door of the suite when he left. There the poor girls would say a few kind words to him, happy in making him happy. It was the one chance they had of exercising their woman’s nature.

Thus, up to the time of their marriage, music became for the girls a life within life, just as, we are told, the Russian peasant takes his dreams for realities, his waking life for a restless sleep. In their eagerness to find some bulwark against the rising tide of pettiness and consuming ascetic ideas, they threw themselves desperately into the difficulties of the musical art. Melody, harmony, and composition, those three daughters of the skies, rewarded their labors, making a rampart for them with their aerial dances, while the old Catholic faun, intoxicated by music, led the chorus. Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Paësiello, Cimarosa, Hummel, along with musicians of lesser rank, developed in them sensations which never passed beyond the modest limit of their veiled bosoms, but which went to the heart of that new world of fancy whither they eagerly betook themselves. When the execution of some piece had been brought to perfection, they would clasp hands and embrace in the wildest ecstasy. The old master called them his Saint Cecilias.

The two Maries did not go to balls till they were sixteen, and then only four times a year, to a few selected houses. They only left their mother’s side when well fortified with rules of conduct, so strict that they could reply nothing but yes and no to their partners. The eye of the Countess never quitted her daughters and seemed to read the words upon their lips. The ball-dresses of the poor little things were models of decorum⁠—high-necked muslin frocks, with an extraordinary number of fluffy frills and long sleeves. This ungraceful costume, which concealed instead of setting off their beauty, reminded one of an Egyptian mummy, in spite of two sweetly pathetic faces which peeped out from the mass of cotton. With all their innocence, they were furious to find themselves the objects of a kindly pity. Where is the woman, however artless, who would not inspire envy rather than compassion? The white matter of their brains was unsoiled by a single perilous, morbid, or even equivocal thought; their hearts were pure, their hands were frightfully red; they were bursting with health. Eve did not leave the hands of her Creator more guileless than were these two girls when they left their mother’s home to go to the mairie and to the church, with one simple but awful command in their ears⁠—to obey in all things the man by whose side they were to spend the night, awake or sleeping. To them it seemed impossible that they should suffer more in the strange house whither they were to be banished than in the maternal convent.

How came it that the father of these girls did nothing to protect them from so crushing a despotism? The Comte de Granville had a great reputation as a judge, able and incorruptible, if sometimes a little carried away by party feeling. Unhappily, by the terms of a remarkable compromise, agreed upon after ten years of married life, husband and wife lived apart, each in their own suite of apartments. The father, who judged the repressive system less dangerous for women than for men, kept the education of his boys in his own hands, while leaving that of the girls to their mother. The two Maries, who could hardly escape the imposition of some tyranny, whether in love or marriage, would suffer less than boys, whose intelligence ought to be unfettered and whose natural spirit would be broken by the harsh constraint of religious dogma, pushed to an extreme. Of four victims the Count saved two. The Countess looked on her sons, both destined for the law⁠—the one for the magistrature assise, the other for the magistrature amovible1⁠—as far too badly brought up to be allowed any intimacy with their sisters. All intercourse between the poor children was strictly guarded. When the Count took his boys from school for a day he was careful that it should not be spent in the house. After luncheon with their mother and sisters he would find something to amuse them outside. Restaurants, theatres, museums, an expedition to the country in summertime, were their treats. Only on important family occasions, such as the birthday of the Countess or of their father, New Year’s Day, and prize-giving days, did the boys spend day and night under the paternal roof, in extreme discomfort, and not daring to kiss their sisters under the eye of the Countess, who never left them alone together for an instant. Seeing so little of their brothers, how was it possible the poor girls should feel any bond with them? On these days it was a perpetual, “Where is Angélique?” “What is Eugénie about?” “Where can my children be?” When her sons were mentioned, the Countess would raise her cold and sodden eyes to Heaven, as though imploring pardon for having failed to snatch them from ungodliness. Her exclamations and her silence in regard to them were alike eloquent as the most lamentable verses of Jeremiah, and the girls not unnaturally came to look on their brothers as hopeless reprobates.

The Count gave to each of his sons, at the age of eighteen, a couple of rooms in his own suite, and they then began to study law under the direction of his secretary, a barrister, to whom he entrusted the task of initiating them into the mysteries of their profession.

The two Maries, therefore, had no practical knowledge of what it is to have a brother. On the occasion of their sisters’ weddings it happened that both brothers were detained at a distance by important cases: the one having then a post as avocat général2 at a distant Court, while the other was making his first appearance in the provinces. In many families the reality of that home-life, which we are apt to picture as linked together by the closest and most vital ties, is something very different. The brothers are far away, engrossed in moneymaking, in pushing their way in the world, or they are chained to the public service; the sisters are absorbed in a vortex of family interests, outside their own circle. Thus the different members spend their lives apart and indifferent to each other, held together only by the feeble bond of memory. If on occasion pride or self-interest reunites them, just as often these motives act in the opposite sense and divide them in heart, as they have already been divided in life, so that it becomes a rare exception to find a family living in one home and animated by one spirit. Modern legislation, by splitting up the family into units, has created that most hideous evil⁠—the isolation of the individual.

Angélique and Eugénie, amid the profound solitude in which their youth glided by, saw their father but rarely, and it was a melancholy face which he showed in his wife’s handsome rooms on the ground floor. At home, as on the bench, he maintained the grave and dignified bearing of the judge. When the girls had passed the period of toys and dolls, when they were beginning, at twelve years of age, to think for themselves, and had given up making fun of Schmucke, they found out the secret of the cares which lined the Count’s forehead. Under the mask of severity they could read traces of a kindly, lovable nature. He had yielded to the Church his place as head of the household, his hopes of wedded happiness had been blighted, and his father’s heart was wounded in its tenderest spot⁠—the love he bore his daughters. Sorrows such as these rouse strange pity in the breasts of girls who have never known tenderness. Sometimes he would stroll in the garden between his daughters, an arm round each little figure, fitting his pace to their childish steps; then, stopping in the shrubbery, he would kiss them, one after the other, on the forehead, while his eyes, his mouth, and his whole expression breathed the deepest pity.

“You are not very happy, my darlings,” he said on one such occasion; “but I shall marry you early, and it will be a good day for me when I see you take wing.”

“Papa,” said Eugénie, “we have made up our minds to marry the first man who offers.”

“And this,” he exclaimed, “is the bitter fruit of such a system. In trying to make saints of them, they⁠ ⁠…”

He stopped. Often the girls were conscious of a passionate tenderness in their father’s farewell, or in the way he looked at them when by chance he dined with their mother. This father, whom they so rarely saw, became the object of their pity, and whom we pity we love. The marriage of both sisters⁠—welded together by misfortune, as Rita-Christina was by nature⁠—was the direct result of this strict conventual training. Many men, when thinking of marriage, prefer a girl taken straight from the convent and impregnated with an atmosphere of devotion to one who has been trained in the school of society. There is no medium. On the one hand is the girl with nothing left to learn, who reads and discusses the papers, who has spun round ballrooms in the arms of countless young men, who has seen every play and devoured every novel, whose knees have been made supple by a dancing-master, pressing them against his own, who does not trouble her head about religion and has evolved her own morality; on the other is the guileless, simple girl of the type of Marie-Angélique and Marie-Eugénie. Possibly the husband’s risk is no greater in the one case than in the other, but the immense majority of men, who have not yet reached the age of Arnolphe, would choose a saintly Agnes rather than a budding Célimène.

The two Maries were identical in figure, feet, and hands. Both were small and slight. Eugénie, the younger, was fair like her mother; Angélique, dark like her father. But they had the same complexion⁠—a skin of that mother-of-pearl white which tells of a rich and healthy blood and against which the carnation stands out in vivid patches, firm in texture like the jasmine, and like it also, delicate, smooth, and soft to the touch. The blue eyes of Eugénie, the brown eyes of Angélique, had the same naive expression of indifference and unaffected astonishment, betrayed by the indecisive wavering of the iris in the liquid white. Their figures were good; the shoulders, a little angular now, would be rounded by time. The neck and bosom, which had been so long veiled, appeared quite startlingly perfect in form, when, at the request of her husband, each sister for the first time attired herself for a ball in a low-necked dress. What blushes covered the poor innocent things, so charming in their shamefacedness, as they first saw themselves in the privacy of their own rooms; nor did the color fade all evening!

At the moment when this story opens, with the younger Marie consoling her weeping sister, they are no longer raw girls. Each had nursed an infant⁠—one a boy, the other a girl⁠—and the hands and arms of both were white as milk. Eugénie had always seemed something of a madcap to her terrible mother, who redoubled her watchful care and severity on her behalf. Angélique, stately and proud, had, she thought, a soul of high temper fitted to guard itself, while the skittish Eugénie seemed to demand a firmer hand. There are charming natures of this kind, misread by destiny, whose life ought to be unbroken sunshine, but who live and die in misery, plagued by some evil genius, the victims of chance. Thus the sprightly, artless Eugénie had fallen under the malign despotism of a parvenu when released from the maternal clutches. Angélique, high-strung and sensitive, had been sent adrift in the highest circles of Parisian society without any restraining curb.