More forbearing than we, these divine creatures do not let
us know when the language of their souls is not understood by us; they
shrink from letting us feel the superiority of their feelings, and
hide their pain as gladly as they silence their wishes: but, having
higher ambitions in love than men, they desire to wed not only the
heart of a husband, but his mind.
To Madame Claes the sense of knowing nothing of a science which
absorbed her husband filled her with a vexation as keen as the beauty
of a rival might have caused. The struggle of woman against woman
gives to her who loves the most the advantage of loving best; but a
mortification like this only proved Madame Claes's powerlessness and
humiliated the feelings by which she lived. She was ignorant; and she
had reached a point where her ignorance parted her from her husband.
Worse than all, last and keenest torture, he was risking his life, he
was often in danger--near her, yet far away, and she might not share,
nor even know, his peril. Her position became, like hell, a moral
prison from which there was no issue, in which there was no hope.
Madame Claes resolved to know at least the outward attractions of this
fatal science, and she began secretly to study chemistry in the books.
From this time the family became, as it were, cloistered.
Such were the successive changes brought by this dire misfortune upon
the family of Claes, before it reached the species of atrophy in which
we find it at the moment when this history begins.
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