family with which we are now concerned, had ended by becoming its
veritable name and by ennobling its vice by incontestable antiquity.

One day, a day of opulence or of penury I know not which, for this
event was a secret between herself and God, but assuredly it was in a
moment of repentance and melancholy, this Marana of the nineteenth
century stood with her feet in the slime and her head raised to
heaven. She cursed the blood in her veins, she cursed herself, she
trembled lest she should have a daughter, and she swore, as such women
swear, on the honor and with the will of the galleys--the firmest
will, the most scrupulous honor that there is on earth--she swore,
before an altar, and believing in that altar, to make her daughter a
virtuous creature, a saint, and thus to gain, after that long line of
lost women, criminals in love, an angel in heaven for them all.

The vow once made, the blood of the Maranas spoke; the courtesan
returned to her reckless life, a thought the more within her heart. At
last she loved, with the violent love of such women, as Henrietta
Wilson loved Lord Ponsonby, as Mademoiselle Dupuis loved Bolingbroke,
as the Marchesa Pescara loved her husband--but no, she did not love,
she adored one of those fair men, half women, to whom she gave the
virtues which she had not, striving to keep for herself all that there
was of vice between them. It was from that weak man, that senseless
marriage unblessed by God or man which happiness is thought to
justify, but which no happiness absolves, and for which men blush at
last, that she had a daughter, a daughter to save, a daughter for whom
to desire a noble life and the chastity she had not. Henceforth, happy
or not happy, opulent or beggared, she had in her heart a pure,
untainted sentiment, the highest of all human feelings because the
most disinterested. Love has its egotism, but motherhood has none. La