Nature’s indifference

Nature’s indifference is the claim that Nature has no moral concern for human choices, whether they produce life, destroy it, or violate conventional duties. In the arguments of Coeur-de-fer and the Comte de Bressac, this claim turns Nature into an alibi: whatever impulse a person follows must serve her, and nothing people do can truly injure her. Therese challenges that reasoning with the language of conscience, justice, and compassion. The novel makes the dispute concrete by placing libertine theories beside coercion, confinement, and the repeated failure of law to protect those with little power.

The doctrine of indifference

Coeur-de-fer argues that the waste of semen cannot be an offense against Nature because reproduction is not her exclusive purpose. He points to nocturnal emissions and the non-use of semen during pregnancy as examples of natural loss, then reasons that human beings may imitate such processes without defying her. Nature permits reproduction, he says, but is no more invested in it than in abstention; human decisions about creating, not creating, or destroying therefore neither please nor disappoint her.

The argument widens from reproduction to religious observance. Whether people worship at one temple or another, Coeur-de-fer contends, Nature is untroubled by the offering: if she allows incense to be burned, the homage cannot offend her. He groups refusal to produce, the waste of reproductive material, and the destruction of what has begun to develop as imaginary crimes, insignificant to an order that does not share human institutions or their judgments. The reach of the claim matters: what begins as a defense of a sexual practice becomes a general denial that human moral categories bind Nature.

Crime recast as natural necessity

The Comte de Bressac applies the doctrine to his plan to kill his aunt and enlist Therese in carrying it out. He tells her that destroying an individual cannot annihilate matter; forms merely change, and the same material continues in other shapes. Since Nature supposedly values human beings no more than animals or plants, he argues that a person’s death is only one transformation among many, not an injury to her purposes.

He also treats human passions as instruments of this impersonal process. Lust produces new individuals; vengeance, avarice, ambition, and other impulses produce destruction. On this account, people are unthinking agents of Nature’s activity, and murder is not a rebellion against her but one of the actions through which her transformations proceed. Bressac identifies motion as Nature’s essential quality and claims that crime sustains it; the person who acts most energetically, rather than the person who remains virtuous and inactive, therefore appears most useful to her. His conclusion—that crime preserves equilibrium—turns violence from a private desire into a supposed natural service.

This logic also erases personal bonds. When Therese objects that Bressac’s intended victim is his aunt, he dismisses kinship as a chain created by law and political institutions, without significance to Nature. The relationship that sharpens the moral stakes for Therese becomes, in his argument, merely a human convention. He offers Therese a fortune if she helps him, making the doctrine not only a philosophical defense but a means of recruitment and pressure.

Therese’s ethical resistance

Therese answers Coeur-de-fer by appealing to religious faith and the hope of justice beyond earthly life. She insists that worldly success cannot be the sole measure of human existence and describes divine judgment as the consolation left to people whom society abandons. Coeur-de-fer rejects that consolation, claiming that the suffering and humiliation of the unfortunate are themselves part of Nature’s design. He goes further: if Nature’s equilibrium requires a sum of crimes, then a criminal should act on harmful impulses rather than restrain them.

Against Bressac, Therese appeals not only to religious belief but to conscience. She rejects the idea that an abstract theory of an impassive Nature can erase the horror of the murder he is planning, and asks him to heed the heart in which, she argues, Nature has inscribed that horror. Her reply exposes the ethical cost of the doctrine: it asks the intended victim’s helper to treat a human life and the bonds between people as morally weightless, even when the speaker’s own conduct supplies an immediate reason for resistance.

Indifference made social and material

The novel’s institutions and private strongholds give the philosophical argument a disturbing social counterpart. At the secluded monastery, the monks’ victims have no reliable access to outsiders or law. A prisoner explains that the fortified retreat guarantees the perpetrators’ impunity and leaves the captives as the only witnesses to their abuses. Girls who fall gravely ill, or whose condition raises fears of contagion, may be removed while still alive; the account notes more than ten such cases over eighteen years. Here, human beings are treated as replaceable, not because Nature has demonstrated that they are, but because those in control can act without public scrutiny or consequence.

The same vulnerability appears in the Comte de Gernande’s household. He tells Therese that, because no one can demand an account of her, she may disappear at his will; obedience will mean safety, resistance may mean death. When he later orders a punitive bloodletting, the Count is called away by news that his wife is dying. In his alarm he leaves the dungeon unsecured, allowing Therese to escape. The reversal does not establish that the powerful have become morally accountable: it gives Therese a chance to flee because the Count’s attention is diverted.

The contrast persists in the eventual official response. Royal letters clear Therese’s name and award her an annual income of a thousand crowns, drawn from gold seized at the counterfeiters’ workshop in Dauphine. Yet the men implicated in her mistreatment have already received powerful appointments, and the edicts do not reach them; their influential families soon quiet the scandal. The episode sets formal justice beside practical impunity, showing how a social order can resemble the indifference invoked by the libertines: injury is real, but its consequences fall unevenly, and power determines whose conduct is answered for.

The doctrine’s narrative function

Nature’s indifference is not presented as an impartial description proven by the novel. It is a doctrine spoken by men who benefit when moral restraints are dismissed, and the scenes around their arguments reveal what the theory obscures: particular people are threatened, confined, or harmed, while perpetrators use wealth, authority, and isolation to escape judgment. The difference between an impersonal account of changing forms and a human account of suffering is central to Therese’s opposition.

The novel also complicates her hope that virtue will be protected. Therese invokes God when she escapes Gernande’s dungeon, but the later royal redress remains incomplete: her innocence is officially recognized, while powerful perpetrators avoid effective punishment. The persistent gap between moral appeal and worldly outcome gives the doctrine its narrative force. The libertines call suffering natural necessity; the plot shows the human arrangements that make victims bear it, and repeatedly tests whether faith, conscience, and law can answer a world in which power so often passes for permission.