France -- History -- Wars of the Vendée, 1793-1832 -- Fiction; Marriage -- Fiction
He married Jacintha, and Josephine set them up in Bigot’s, (deceased)
auberge. Jacintha shone as a landlady, and custom flowed in. For all
that, a hankering after Beaurepaire was observable in her. Her favorite
stroll was into the Beaurepaire kitchen, and on all fetes and grand
occasions she was prominent in gay attire as a retainer of the house.
The last specimen of her homely sagacity I shall have the honor to lay
before you is a critique upon her husband, which she vented six years
after marriage.
“My Dard,” said she, “is very good as far as he goes. What he has felt
himself, that he can feel FOR: nobody better. You come to him with an
empty belly, or a broken head, or all bleeding with a cut, or black
and blue, and you shall find a friend. But if it is a sore heart, or
trouble, and sorrow, and no hole in your carcass to show for it, you had
better come to ME; for you might as well tell your grief to a stone wall
as to my man.”
The baroness took her son Raynal to Paris, and there, with keen eye,
selected him a wife. She proved an excellent one. It would have been
hard if she had not, for the baroness with the severe sagacity of her
age and sex, had set aside as naught a score of seeming angels, before
she could suit herself with a daughter-in-law. At first the Raynals very
properly saw little of the Dujardins; but when both had been married
some years, the recollection of that fleeting and nominal connection
waxed faint, while the memory of great benefits conferred on both sides
remained lively as ever in hearts so great, and there was a warm, a
sacred friendship between the two houses--a friendship of the ancient
Greeks, not of the modern club-house.
Camille and Josephine were blessed almost beyond the lot of humanity:
none can really appreciate sunshine but those who come out of the cold
dark. And so with happiness. For years they could hardly be said to live
like mortals: they basked in bliss. But it was a near thing; for they
but just scraped clear of life-long misery, and death’s cold touch
grazed them both as they went.
Yet they had heroic virtues to balance White Lies in the great Judge’s
eye.
A wholesome lesson, therefore, and a warning may be gathered from this
story: and I know many novelists who would have preached that lesson at
some length in every other chapter, and interrupted the sacred
narrative to do it. But when I read stories so mutilated, I think of a
circumstance related by Mr. Joseph Miller.
“An Englishman sojourning in some part of Scotland was afflicted with
many hairs in the butter, and remonstrated. He was told, in reply, that
the hairs and the butter came from one source--the cow; and that the
just and natural proportions hitherto observed, could not be deranged,
and bald butter invented--for ONE. ‘So be it,’ said the Englishman; ‘but
let me have the butter in one plate, and the hairs in another.’”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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