Every woman will begin with her own redemption. She is at first thrown out into the world while still a child, almost in childish innocence: very soon rigorous duties, material and oppressive in character, seize upon her: she is, so to speak, battered and rolled out by very rough forces—the firm authority of her husband, the idea of obedience, the trials of motherhood, fruitful in joys, but also in hardships and cares. Whilst her will is annihilated and enslaved, and her heart often remains an undiscovered country, she assists with pain and disgust at the downfall of her flesh—that flesh which has become the abode of pain, a body of death, to give birth to life. How is the sudden thrill brought about, turning the dull, torpid larva into the bright butterfly? How do women succeed in drawing from this essentially human condition something of the divine, passing from physical production to spiritual production? These above all are the questions we must seek to determine. It must not be expected that we shall present to our readers fair barristers, or engineers, or professional scholars, still less pedants. No; these ladies were simply modest women, who took their share in the humblest duties of everyday life, but discovered, apart from charity in the material sense, the absolute necessity of another charity, moral charity for moral and spiritual penury, for those destitute of happiness, so numerous and found everywhere, even within the walls of the Louvre. If they accomplished a revolution, it was a peaceful and internal one. They piled up no barricades, issued no manifestos, launched no declaration of their rights as women and citizens. Though the laws were not generally favourable to them, they demanded no amendment of the laws; the same magistrates continued as in the past to deliver the same judgments from the same benches, politicians still made their fortunes, ploughmen still followed the plough, engineers continued to construct bridges and make roads, notaries to scan the cause-lists. Nothing was changed, in appearance, in the material course of the world, except that a moral power had come into being, and that women, like the goddesses of happiness painted by Nattier, under the cloak of indifference had taken into their keeping a mysterious urn, whence life seemed to gush in a spontaneous stream, without the help of judges, engineers, or notaries, yet continually sending out the current essential to the sweetness and fruitfulness of the world. BOOK I. FAMILY LIFE CHAPTER I MARRIAGE