Free The Lady of Situations by Louis Auchincloss

making love, between two persons too closely related to marry legally. Now of course the heroine could not marry Hippolyte at all because she was already married to his father. But if she hadn't been, there would have been no impediment that I could see. I mean she and Hippolyte were not blood relations, were they?"
    This provoked an animated discussion of many voices.
    "But he was her stepson! Incest doesn't have to be between an actual mother and son, does it?"
    "Of course it does. That's the whole point of it."
    "Anyway, wasn't she guilty of
moral
incest?"
    "Why was she guilty of anything? She didn't
do
anything, did she? After all, Hippolyte wouldn't even look at her."
    "But she wanted to do plenty. Oh, didn't she!"
    "You mean she
only
wanted to commit an act that would have been
only
moral incest. It seems to me that's getting pretty far away from any real sin."
    "What I find unattractive is that Hippolyte was young enough to be her son."
    "What makes you think that? She may have been only a couple of years older than him."
    Mrs. Knight's voice rose above the babble. "When I saw the divine Sarah in the role, she must have been well in her fifties, if not more, and Hippolyte was played by a strapping youth. I feel all the anguish of an aging woman in the lines. Oh, how can you miss it?" She closed her eyes again tightly, as if evoking a memory too flaming to be hid. The room was silent with surprise and perhaps with awe. "No, that immortal verse speaks with a terrible clarity to those who have been through a certain ordeal. To those who know what it is to feel the passing of beauty in the beholder while it is at its most poignant in the beheld."
    Mrs. Evans was plainly disgusted. "I think we are straying from our analysis of the play. I am going to ask Natica to give us her reaction. She, after all, was the one who proposed Racine."
    "Well, I think, Marjorie, the reason we find the dramatic situation a bit confusing is that we are not Jansenists, as he was."
    "Suppose you explain to us just what a Jansenist is, dear."
    Natica supposed she was being warned not to "show off," but she had started and had to go on. "A Jansenist was a kind of French puritan. He believed that all men are saved or damned before they are born, and that there's nothing in the world we can do about it. Phèdre is damned because she loves her stepson, as it was always in the cards, at least in
hex
cards, that she would. It isn't in any way her fault; it's Venus's fault. And she knows this and knows that it's hideously unfair. That's her tragedy."
    There was another outburst.
    "Why, that's horrible!"
    "How could anyone believe anything so awful? To be damned for something she couldn't help? What sort of a religion is that?"
    "We might all be damned if it was just a question of
feeling.
"
    "Ladies, ladies!" Mrs. Evans raised a silencing hand. "Natica had made an interesting point, but surely she is overlooking the central crisis of. the play. Phèdre falsely accuses Hippolyte of attempted rape, and for this his father has him killed. So she's really guilty of murder. That to me settles the question of damnation. If she's not damned, she's in for a long term in purgatory."
    "But she never dreamed Thésée would go so far!" Natica protested, appalled by this oversimplification of her favorite drama. "You remember, her old nurse Oenone told her,
'Un père en punissant est toujours père.'
She has been tricked by circumstance into believing her husband is dead. She has been driven almost mad by frustration and humiliation. And she is on her way to tell Thésée the truth, at the risk of her own life, when she receives the body blow of learning that Hippolyte loves Aricie. She hasn't eaten or slept for days; she is half dead, and Oenone works on her fevered imagination..."
    "I'm afraid someone else's imagination is a bit fevered," Mrs. Evans interrupted icily. "And, if you don't mind, Natica, I think it's time some of the other ladies had a