“Be that as it may, madam, still I am a mother, and the feelings of a mother need not be sanctified, in order to be holy. Well, then, madam, tell me--for you should better comprehend these things than I--tell me if those who have given us birth, have received from heaven a voice which speaks to our hearts--have not those to whom we have given birth a voice as powerful, and when these two voices are opposed to each other, to which ought we to obey?” “You will never hear the voice of your child.” said the marchioness; “for you will never again see him.” “I shall never again see my son!” exclaimed Marguerite, “and who, madam, can assert that positively?” “He will himself be ignorant as to whose son he is.” “And should he some day discover it?” replied Marguerite; whose respect as a daughter was giving way before her mother’s harshness; “if he should then come to me and demand an account of his birth--and this may happen, madam,”--she took up the pen--“and, with such an alternative awaiting me, tell me, ought I to sign this contract?” “Sign it,” said the marchioness. “But,” observed Marguerite, placing her trembling and convulsed fingers upon the contract, “should my husband some day discover the existence of this child; should he demand an explanation from my lover, of the wrong committed against his name and honor? If in a desperate duel, alone and without seconds--a duel in which it is agreed that one must fall, he should kill that lover, and then, tormented by his conscience, pursued by a voice from the tomb, my husband should at length become deprived of reason--” “Be silent!” cried the marchioness, her features quivering with terror, but still doubting whether it was chance, or some unheard of discovery which dictated the words her daughter had employed: “be silent!” “You would have me, then,” continued Marguerite, who had now said too much to pause, “you would have me, then, in order to preserve my name, and that of my other children, pure and unsullied, that I should immure myself with a man deprived of reason! you would have me banish from my sight, and from his, every living being, and that I should render my heart iron, that I may no longer feel--that my eyes should never shed a tear! You would have me, then, clothe myself in mourning as a widow, before my husband’s death? You would have my hair turn white, twenty years before the accustomed time?” “Be silent! say not another word!” cried the marchioness, in a tone which proved that menaces were giving way to fear: “be silent!” “You would have me, then,” continued Marguerite, carried away by the bitterness of her grief; “you would have me, then, in order that the dreadful secret might die with those who have the keeping of it, that I should banish from their death-beds, both priest and physician--you would, in fine, that I should wander from one death-bed to another, that I might close, not the eyes, but the mouths of the dying.”