The injured party must address his or her complaint to the Consistory. This first tribunal examines the facts, and if it finds in them _primâ facie_ a case for divorce, it tries first of all to reconcile the petitioner and respondent, summoning them before it, and seeking to persuade the one to pardon and the other to return to the path of duty.
Not until it has failed in this attempt at reconciliation does the Consistory inform the Holy Synod of the petition that has been made to it, and it is only after a long and careful examination that the higher court will pronounce the decree of divorce, inflicting upon the guilty one at the same time a religious penance and celibacy.
The penance may be a stay of several months in a convent, but the condemned one can easily escape from the enforced retirement by the payment of a sum of money. As for the decree of celibacy, the emperor alone, on the recommendation of the Holy Synod, can abrogate it; but if authority is sometimes given to a divorced husband to marry again, the grace is always withheld from a guilty wife. A woman can marry a second time only in case of the decree having been pronounced against her first husband, or when the separation has been without stain upon the honor of the husband or wife; for instance, in case of incompatibility of temper, or of certain infirmities duly provided for by the civil code.
Formerly, it is true, matters of the kind were managed among the Russians with greater simplicity. The husband and wife who longed for a separation went out of their house holding a piece of linen or other thin stuff, each of them having an end of it. So they went to the nearest public square and pulled till the piece of stuff parted. Then they went each their way: they were divorced.
Unhappily for the Princess Olsdorf this was no longer the practice; the summons of the delegate of the Consistory recalled the fact to her. She knew that she would again be brought face to face with her husband, to accuse him of having been unfaithful to her; and, though the lesson had been taught her, and mortifying as was the memory she had of the encounter with the beautiful Vera Soublaieff in the Rue Auber, still, it is not hard to suppose, she dreaded not being able to support her petition with due firmness.