in her tastes.
Madame de la Baudraye deserts her husband, and lives for some years with
her disreputable lover at Paris, and does not in the least forfeit the
sympathies of her creator. Balzac's feminine types may be classified
pretty easily. At bottom they are all of the sultana variety--playthings
who occasionally venture into mixing with the serious affairs of life,
but then only on pain of being ridiculous (as in the 'Employes,' or the
'Muse du Departement'); but properly confined to their drawing-rooms,
with delicate cajoleries for their policy, and cunning instead of
intellect. Sometimes they are cold-hearted and selfish, and then they
are vicious, making victims of lovers, husbands, or fathers, consuming
fortunes, and spreading ill-will by cunning intrigues; sometimes they
are virtuous, and therefore according to Balzac's logic, pitiable
victims of the world. But their virtue, when it exists, is the effect,
not of lofty principle, but of a certain delicacy of taste corresponding
to a fine organisation. They object to vice, because it is apt to be
coarse; and are perfectly ready to yield, if it can be presented in such
graceful forms as not to shock their sensibilities. Marriage is
therefore a complicated intrigue in which one party is always deceived,
though it may be for his or her good. If you will be loved, says the
judicious lady in the 'Memoires de Deux Jeunes Mariees,' the secret is
not to love; and the rather flimsy epigram is converted into a great
moral truth. The justification of the lady is, that love is only made
permanent by elaborate intrigue. The wife is to be always on the footing
of a mistress who can only preserve her lover by incessant and
infinitely varied caresses. To do this, she must be herself cool. The
great enemy of matrimonial happiness is satiety, and we are constantly
presented with an affectionate wife boring her husband to death, and
alienating him by over-devotion. If one party is to be cheated, the one
who is freest from passion will be the winner of the game. As a maxim,
after the fashion of Rochefoucauld, this doctrine may have enough truth
to be plausible; but when seriously accepted and made the substantive
moral of a succession of stories, one is reminded less of a really acute
observer than of a lad fresh from college who thinks that wisdom
consists in an exaggerated cynicism. When ladies of this variety break
their hearts, they either die or retire in a picturesque manner to