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]