We live in days when sisters married into such antagonist spheres can very well not love each other, and therefore the historian is bound to relate the reasons of this tender affection, preserved without spot or jar in spite of their husbands' contempt for each other and their own social disunion.

A rapid glance at their childhood will explain the situation.
Brought up in a gloomy house in the Marais, by a woman of narrow mind, a "devote" who, being sustained by a sense of duty (sacred phrase!), had fulfilled her tasks as a mother religiously, Marie-Angelique and Marie Eugenie de Granville reached the period of their marriage--the first at eighteen, the second at twenty years of age--without ever leaving the domestic zone where the rigid maternal eye controlled them.

Up to that time they had never been to a play; the churches of Paris were their theatre.

Their education in their mother's house had been as rigorous as it would have been in a convent.

From infancy they had slept in a room adjoining that of the Comtesse de Granville, the door of which stood always open.