“One must expect nothing but calamity” for virtue in a corrupt society

“One must expect nothing but calamity” for virtue in a corrupt society is Dubois’s bleak maxim about the danger of principled conduct in a world where wrongdoing prospers. The phrase is more than a prediction: it names the pattern that Therese sees in her own history, even as she refuses to treat that pattern as permission to commit a crime.

The maxim and its challenge

As Dubois takes Therese toward Monseigneur’s country house, she argues that Therese has been punished repeatedly for her “good behavior and false principles.” She presents virtue as a choice that leaves a person exposed: one who tries to remain virtuous while standing apart from a corrupt society, she insists, should expect calamity. Her warning is bound up with a larger rejection of divine justice. Dubois calls Therese’s belief in an avenging God a fiction and argues that Nature needs no master to govern it. In her account, neither Providence nor moral principle offers dependable protection from human cruelty.

The maxim is therefore also an attempt to recruit. Dubois offers to save Therese if she will join a plan to kill Monseigneur and steal the money hidden at his country house. She presents the proposed murder as punishment for a man she calls a criminal, and argues that carrying it out would aid the law. The appeal turns Therese’s suffering into leverage: if virtue has brought only hardship, Dubois suggests, Therese should abandon it for an alliance that promises survival and material gain.

Therese’s refusal

Therese rejects the distinction Dubois tries to draw between punishing crime and committing one. She answers that Dubois proposes the deed for her own purposes, not to administer justice, and that the existence of a guilty target does not make private violence legitimate. Laws, she insists, must take their course; justice has not been entrusted to their “feeble hands.” Her response makes the disagreement ethical as well as practical. Dubois judges the plan by its promised advantage and its target’s guilt; Therese refuses it because she believes that taking the law into her own hands would itself be wrong.

Dubois answers the refusal with a threat: Therese will die if she will not become her accomplice. The threat gives the maxim an immediate, personal consequence. Therese’s virtue does not shield her from danger; it becomes the reason Dubois turns against her. Yet her refusal also shows that the forecast of calamity does not determine her conduct. She recognizes the cost and still declines to commit the proposed crime.

The pattern in Therese’s recollection

Later, reflecting on her misfortunes, Therese gathers the maxim’s logic into a series of reversals. As a child, she refused a usurer’s inducement to steal, while he went on to become rich. She escaped a band of thieves with a man whose life she had saved, only to be betrayed by him. At the estate of an aristocratic libertine, her refusal to poison his aunt was followed by an attack with dogs. Her attempt to prevent a surgeon from committing a crime ended with her being branded as a criminal, while he continued his advancement.

The pattern extends beyond those episodes. Therese recalls seeking religious observance and finding herself humiliated, trying to protect a woman from her husband and facing danger herself, and helping people who repaid her with theft or exploitation. A gentleman who offered to compensate for her sufferings died before he could help her. When she risked her life to rescue a child from a fire, the child’s mother accused her and began legal proceedings. Each episode changes the expected meaning of her action: help does not secure gratitude, refusal does not ensure safety, and appeals to justice do not prevent injustice.

Significance

Therese’s retrospective account gives concrete form to Dubois’s claim that virtue is liable to bring calamity in a corrupt society. Again and again, an attempt to act generously or refuse wrongdoing leaves Therese more vulnerable, while the people who harm or betray her prosper. The contrast makes her question why Providence appears to punish her virtues while those who crush her through crime rise to the heights of happiness.

But the narrative does not simply adopt Dubois’s answer. Therese’s account demonstrates the failures of worldly justice and the terrible cost of virtue; her refusal to murder Monseigneur nevertheless preserves a distinction between suffering injustice and becoming its agent. At the end of her recollection, she faces death without expecting earthly rescue, but retains hope that innocence will receive recompense in another world. The maxim thus captures the book’s recurring contradiction: virtue may lead to calamity on earth, yet Therese continues to regard it as a principle she must not abandon.