Letters of Two Brides

LOUISE DE CHAULIEU TO MME. DE L'ESTORADE

March.

Ah! my love, marriage is making a philosopher of you! Your darling

face must, indeed, have been jaundiced when you wrote me those

terrible views of human life and the duty of women. Do you fancy you

will convert me to matrimony by your programme of subterranean labors?

Alas! is this then the outcome for you of our too-instructed dreams!

We left Blois all innocent, armed with the pointed shafts of

meditation, and, lo! the weapons of that purely ideal experience have

turned against your own breast! If I did not know you for the purest

and most angelic of created beings, I declare I should say that your

calculations smack of vice. What, my dear, in the interest of your

country home, you submit your pleasures to a periodic thinning, as you

do your timber.

Oh! rather let me perish in all the violence of the

heart's storms than live in the arid atmosphere of your cautious

arithmetic! As girls, we were both unusually enlightened, because of the large

amount of study we gave to our chosen subjects; but, my child,

philosophy without love, or disguised under a sham love, is the most

hideous of conjugal hypocrisies. I should imagine that even the

biggest of fools might detect now and again the owl of wisdom

squatting in your bower of roses--a ghastly phantom sufficient to put

to flight the most promising of passions. You make your own fate,

instead of waiting, a plaything in its hands.

We are each developing in strange ways. A large dose of philosophy to

a grain of love is your recipe; a large dose of love to a grain of

philosophy is mine. Why, Rousseau's Julie, whom I thought so learned,

is a mere beginner to you. Woman's virtue, quotha! How you have

weighed up life! Alas! I make fun of you, and, after all, perhaps you

are right.

In one day you have made a holocaust of your youth and become a miser

before your time. Your Louis will be happy, I daresay. If he loves

you, of which I make no doubt, he will never find out, that, for the

sake of your family, you are acting as a courtesan does for money; and

certainly men seem to find happiness with them, judging by the

fortunes they squander thus. A keen-sighted husband might no doubt

remain in love with you, but what sort of gratitude could he feel in

the long run for a woman who had made of duplicity a sort of moral

armor, as indispensable as her stays?

Love, dear, is in my eyes the first principle of all the virtues,

conformed to the divine likeness. Like all other first principles, it

is not a matter of arithmetic; it is the Infinite in us. I cannot but

think you have been trying to justify in your own eyes the frightful

position of a girl, married to a man for whom she feels nothing more

than esteem. You prate of duty, and make it your rule and measure; but

surely to take necessity as the spring of action is the moral theory

of atheism? To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret

law of every woman's heart. You are acting a man's part, and your

Louis will have to play the woman!