This woman,
who, if closely studied, would have shown the most savage traits of
the peasant class, was still the girl who had clawed her cousin's
nose, and who, if she had not been trained to reason, would perhaps
have killed her in a fit of jealousy.
It was only her knowledge of the laws and of the world that enabled
her to control the swift instinct with which country folk, like wild
men, reduce impulse to action. In this alone, perhaps, lies the
difference between natural and civilized man. The savage has only
impulse; the civilized man has impulses and ideas. And in the savage
the brain retains, as we may say, but few impressions, it is wholly at
the mercy of the feeling that rushes in upon it; while in the
civilized man, ideas sink into the heart and change it; he has a
thousand interests and many feelings, where the savage has but one at
a time. This is the cause of the transient ascendency of a child over
its parents, which ceases as soon as it is satisfied; in the man who
is still one with nature, this contrast is constant. Cousin Betty, a
savage of Lorraine, somewhat treacherous too, was of this class of
natures, which are commoner among the lower orders than is supposed,
accounting for the conduct of the populace during revolutions.
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