To come so low as to beg servants to reveal secrets to you, and to fall
lower still by paying for a revelation, is not a crime; it is perhaps
not even a dastardly act, but it is certainly a piece of folly; for
nothing will ever guarantee to you the honesty of a servant who betrays
her mistress, and you can never feel certain whether she is operating
in your interest or in that of your wife. This point therefore may be
looked upon as beyond controversy.
Nature, that good and tender parent, has set round about the mother of
a family the most reliable and the most sagacious of spies, the most
truthful and at the same time the most discreet in the world. They are
silent and yet they speak, they see everything and appear to see
nothing.
One day I met a friend of mine on the boulevard. He invited me to
dinner, and we went to his house. Dinner had been already served, and
the mistress of the house was helping her two daughters to plates of
soup.
“I see here my first symptoms,” I said to myself.
We sat down. The first word of the husband, who spoke without thinking,
and for the sake of talking, was the question:
“Has any one been here to-day?”
“Not a soul,” replied his wife, without lifting her eyes.
I shall never forget the quickness with which the two daughters looked
up to their mother. The elder girl, aged eight, had something
especially peculiar in her glance. There was at the same time
revelation and mystery, curiosity and silence, astonishment and apathy
in that look. If there was anything that could be compared to the speed
with which the light of candor flashed from their eyes, it was the
prudent reserve with which both of them closed down, like shutters, the
folds of their white eyelids.
Ye sweet and charming creatures, who from the age of nine even to the
age of marriage too often are the torment of a mother even when she is
not a coquette, is it by the privilege of your years or the instinct of
your nature that your young ears catch the faint sound of a man’s voice
through walls and doors, that your eyes are awake to everything, and
that your young spirit busies itself in divining all, even the meaning
of a word spoken in the air, even the meaning of your mother’s
slightest gesture?
There is something of gratitude, something in fact instinctive, in the
predilection of fathers for their daughters and mothers for their sons.
But the act of setting spies which are in some way inanimate is mere
dotage, and nothing is easier than to find a better plan than that of
the beadle, who took it into his head to put egg-shells in his bed, and
who obtained no other sympathy from his confederate than the words,
“You are not very successful in breaking them.”
The Marshal de Saxe did not give much consolation to his Popeliniere
when they discovered in company that famous revolving chimney, invented
by the Duc de Richelieu.
“That is the finest piece of horn work that I have ever seen!” cried
the victor of Fontenoy.
Let us hope that your espionage will not give you so troublesome a
lesson. Such misfortunes are the fruits of the civil war and we do not
live in that age.