Then, when the adored daughter herself
marries, the mother must make every possible sacrifice for her, and the
daughter must accept them all with indifference, as mere matters of
course. But what is the final, triumphant proof of the theorem? Why, of
course, the mother must kill her mother to save the daughter's life! And
this ultra-obligatory scene M. Hervieu duly serves up to us.
Marie-Jeanne (the daughter) is ordered to the Engadine; Sabine (the
mother) is warned that Madame Fontenais (the grandmother) must not go to
that altitude on pain of death; but, by a series of violently artificial
devices, things are so arranged that Marie-Jeanne cannot go unless
Madame Fontenais goes too; and Sabine, rather than endanger her
daughter's recovery, does not hesitate to let her mother set forth,
unwittingly, to her doom. In the last scene of all, Marie-Jeanne
light-heartedly prepares to leave her mother and go off with her husband
to the ends of the earth; Sabine learns that the man she loved and
rejected for Marie-Jeanne's sake is for ever lost to her; and, to
complete the demonstration, Madame Fontenais falls dead at her feet.
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