War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [546]
They were sitting in the drawing room by the window. It was twilight. Through the window came the scent of flowers. Hélène was wearing a white dress, transparent on the shoulders and breast. The abbé, a well-fed man with a plump, clean-shaven chin, a pleasant, firm mouth, and white hands folded meekly on his knees, sat close to Hélène and, with a subtle smile on his lips, looked at her face now and then with a glance peacefully admiring of her beauty, and expounded his view of the question that concerned them. Hélène, smiling uneasily, looked at his wavy hair, clean-shaven, plump, bluish cheeks, and expected the conversation to take a new turn any moment. But the abbé, though obviously enjoying the beauty and closeness of his interlocutrice, was carried away by his mastery of the case.
The course of the spiritual director’s reasoning was as follows. In ignorance of the meaning of what you were undertaking, you gave a vow of marital fidelity to a man who, for his part, having entered into marriage without believing in its religious meaning, had committed blasphemy. This marriage did not have the double meaning it should have had. But despite that, you were bound by your vow. You departed from it. What did you commit in so doing? A péché veniel or a péché mortel?*518 A péché veniel, because you committed your act without bad intent. If you now entered into a new marriage, with the purpose of having children, your sin could be forgiven. But again the question falls into two parts: first…
“But I think,” said the suddenly bored Hélène with her enchanting smile, “that, having embraced the true religion, I cannot be bound by what a false religion imposed on me.”
The directeur de conscience was astounded by this Columbus’s egg that stood before him with such simplicity.7 He was delighted with the unexpectedly quick success of his pupil, but could not renounce the edifice of arguments he had erected with such mental labor.
“Entendons-nous, comtesse,”†519 he said with a smile and began to refute the reasoning of his spiritual daughter.
VII
Hélène realized that the case was very simple and easy from the point of view of spiritual direction, but that her directors made difficulties only because they had apprehensions about how the secular authorities would look at it.
And as a result, Hélène decided that the case had to be prepared for in society. She provoked the jealousy of the old dignitary and told him the same thing as the first suitor, that is, put things so that the only way to obtain rights over her was to marry her. The old important person was as struck for the first moment by this proposal to marry her while her husband was living as the first, young person had been; but Hélène’s unshakeable conviction that this was as simple and natural as a young girl getting married had its effect on him, too. If even the slightest signs of hesitation, shame, or secretiveness had been noticeable in Hélène herself, her case would undoubtedly have been lost; but not only were there no signs of secretiveness or shame, but, on the contrary, with simplicity and good-natured naïveté, she told