TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE PRASLIN CORRESPONDENCE.
THE published documents in the Praslin affair confirm our ori- ginal doubt whether the insane furor of the Duke was altogether so unaccountable; and they cast shame on the heated partisan- ship exhibited by the judicial personages, from the Juge d'In- struction to the Grand Chancellor. The documents make the whole matter sufficiently and painfully intelligible ; although some points of detail still remain in obscurity.
The union between the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin and Made- moiselle Sebastiani was a "manage de convenance." There ap- pears to have been no feeling of repulsion between the two, but they were of totally incompatible natures. On the side of the Dutchess, there was evidently a considerable warmth of affection ; the Duke, as evidently, was swayed by the considerations of for- tune which regulate such unions in France even more than in England. But there were some special peculiarities in the case. The Dutchess had been brought up more in an English than a French fashion, and she introduced into their arrangements some English customs not compatible with French usages. In France, we believe, it is thought proper that the birth of a child should involve for the husband an exile from the nuptial couch for the whole time required by the functions of maternity—a period pro- bably extending over a large portion of two years. A correla- tive usage is a discreet blindness and deafness on the part of the wife to any reports which may reach her. Madame de Praslin's English-numbered family and English views of domestic morals would be regarded as a serious "inconvenience." But her personal character must have gone yet further in creating discomfort. We judge her by her own letters. She was animated in her sense of domestic affections, copious in her expression of them, exacting of return. She was jealously dis- posed, and uniformly so of her daughter's governesses : " the system of governesses," she writes, "has never succeeded." She was, she says, "violent" in her expression of resentment. She was greedy of power : jealous of her husband's affection for her children, of theirs for the governess, of the governess's for any one but the mother, she clearly regretted more than any- thing her own failure to establish a paramount influence over each. She avows that it was the " position " of the governess which disturbed her, and notjealousy of the ordinary kind : and she explicitly declares that for eighteen months or two years before the murder the Duke had no undue familiarity with the instruc- tress of his children. All these passions were exasperated to a
hitch of madness by the neglect of the Duke. Their domestic istory is a tragic paraphrase of Figaro ; she being the Countess Almaviva, only not patiently submissive.
The Duke was a very dark imitation of the Count. Irritable, gross in his tastes, imperious, his affections were not to be fed by sentimental tears nor redeemed by eloquent and only too just re- proaches. He seems not to have been without ability or good feeling; but rumour assigns to his conduct a degree of irregularity only to be expressed by allusions to classical antiquity. It is possible that with a less singular wife he might have been be- trayed into less criminal excesses. As it was, her prose Sapphics were a mere irritant : he could not feel their sentiment—they were merely a nuisance ; and yet a terrible substantiveness was imparted to all that he might otherwise have regarded as lachry- mose nonsense, by the threat which the wife is said to have thrown out, that she would demand a separation—a real scandal among the higher classes of France, and a formidable inroad on the fortune of the numerous circle of children which the Dutchess had borne to the Duke.
The share which the governess had in these transactions appears to have been a passive one. There is no evidence that any undue familiarity had been permitted by her. It was presumed in her case as a matter of course ; but she denies it ; and many marks of esteem bestowed by the Dutchess, in the midst of all her angers, attest a lurking sense of personal respect and of doubt in her own suspicions. That the governess was a person of un- common ability and discreetness, is shown by her answers under examination ; which are direct, lucid, just in sentiment, and im- pressive: they prove either that she was innocent or that she pos- sesses the most extraordinary command of herself and of her style: they are either the lucid exposition of a well-regulated mind, or marvels of art in composition "under difficulties." Whether or not she is chargeable with the assumed indiscre- tions in conduct, will perhaps neva. be known ; but the balance of evidence is against such a supposition, and at the worst she was the victim of a diseased state of family relations.
The whole exhibition is deplorable ; but perhaps its most in- structive moral lies in the illustration of the great defect in do- mestic education, in England as well as France. We give our children instruction in matters of history and science; we teach them what are religion and morals, in a broad and abstract way, with too little of the practical; but the thing which we most of all neglect—which we scarcely think of even, in the regulation of our own conduct and example, is the science of domestic regimen —the art of adjusting our own conduct so as to promote the greatest amount of happiness from the dispositions of those by which we are surrounded. The science of family (esthetics is altogether neglected : we do not bring up our children to discri- minate even between such broadly distinct classes of things, as
those which are compelled by law or usage, those which are to be exacted by force of influence or conduct, and those which are to be won from a purely spontaneous good-will. This poor Dutchess was plainly untaught on such subjects : she sought things which are to be obtained by force of influence without knowing what sort of influence to employ ; she demanded as a right her husband's love, love being a purely spontaneous senti- ment : she discovered his real nature too late, if at all, and does not seem even then to have discovered that her own conduct, however accordant with abstract moral propriety, was not of a kind to bring about the ends at which she aimed. There is a high and sacred art in the use of domestic influences, never taught, seldom learned. The ignorance of the unfortunate lady made her goad the morbid brute to delirious rage, and was ex:- piated in her blood.
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