Before marriage,
they have received from their mothers and the world they live in the
baptism of good manners; though women of rank, anxious to hand down
their traditions, do not always see the bearing of their own lessons
when they say to their daughters: "That is a motion that must not be
made;" "Never laugh at such things;" "No lady ever flings herself on a
sofa; she sits down quietly;" "Pray give up such detestable ways;" "My
dear, that is a thing which is never done," etc.
Many bourgeois critics unjustly deny the innocence and virtue of young
girls who, like Sabine, are truly virgin at heart, improved by the
training of their minds, by the habit of noble bearing, by natural
good taste, while, from the age of sixteen, they have learned how to
use their opera-glasses. Sabine was a girl of this school, which was
also that of Mademoiselle de Chaulieu. This inborn sense of the
fitness of things, these gifts of race made Sabine de Grandlieu as
interesting a young woman as the heroine of the "Memoirs of two young
Married Women." Her letters to her mother during the honeymoon, of
which we here give three or four, will show the qualities of her mind
and temperament.
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