CHAPTER I

THE WOMEN OF THE RENAISSANCE

A STUDY OF FEMINISM

OPINIONS OF THE FRENCH PRESS.

“M. de Maulde has exhausted the subject, and gives us a sort of bible of

the feminine life.”—_Revue des Deux Mondes._

“Among the numerous writings on feminism which have appeared in

these latter days, none is more complete and entertaining than M. de

Maulde’s.”—_Journal des Débats._

“M. de Maulde has written a most captivating volume, which will remain a

definitive monument henceforth indispensable to anyone who wishes to know

the history of the French soul.”—_Revue des Revues._

“The question of feminism has been treated in masterly fashion by M. de

Maulde in his fine book on _The Women of the Renaissance_. And while he

draws the completest picture of French and Italian society in the 15th

and 16th centuries, and groups his finished portraits with accomplished

art, he at the same time marvellously depicts the charm and the influence

of women at that curious epoch.”—_République Française._

“It is almost impossible to name a more fascinating book for anyone

interested in history.... We have no idea of attempting to sum it up

or condense it in a few pages; it would suffer too seriously in the

process; we should merely like, without recommending it (which would be

superfluous) to the attention of our readers, to indicate its merit, its

charm, and its opportuneness.”—_Correspondant._

EXTRACT FROM A REVIEW IN _The Athenaeum_.

“M. de Maulde writes in great detail and with commendable erudition

on the position of women and the feminist movement of the sixteenth

century as it shaped itself in Italy and, later, in France. These

studies of the woman of those days, in all her social relations and in

all her activities, are illustrated with an unceasing flow of anecdote

and citation, never more apt than when employed to characterise

that remarkable group who were imbued with the so-called ‘idées

platoniciennes.’... After a really interesting sketch of the composition

of that curious amalgam which finds its complete expression in the

harangue of Bembo ... M. de Maulde draws many inferences which have a

direct application to the feminist movement of our own day; in contrast,

for instance, with the mystical ardours of Renaissance platonism we hear

of the naturalism of John Ruskin. For this reason the book will, we

think, attract a wide circle of readers; many ... will be delighted by

its store of lively and significant anecdote.”

[Illustration]

The Women of

the Renaissance

_A Study of Feminism_

By

R. de Maulde la Clavière

Translated by

George Herbert Ely

“The path of a good woman is indeed strewn with flowers, but

they rise behind her steps, not before them.”—RUSKIN.

_With a Portrait of the Author_

New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons

London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Lim.

1900

To

WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

EDITOR OF TUDOR TRANSLATIONS

THIS VERSION IS

INSCRIBED

CORRIGENDA

Transcriber’s Note: These corrections have been applied.

Page 8, line 21, _for_ Women’s _read_ Woman’s.

Page 39, foot-note, _for_ precèdent l’amour _read_ procèdent de l’amour.

Page 148, line 20, _for_ Saint-Marthe _read_ Sainte-Marthe.

Page 191, line 13, _for_ Joconda _read_ Gioconda.

Page 191, line 22, _for_ exuberance _read_ encumbrance.

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

No mere translator can hope to preserve the style of his original, and

herein M. de Maulde is bound to suffer more than most writers. There

is no one to whom Buffon’s phrase, _Le style est l’homme même_, may be

more justly applied. His work is absolutely himself; it derives from

his original personality and his wide and sure learning an historical

value and a literary charm almost unique. He is a wit with the curiosity

and patience of the scholar, and a scholar with the temperament of the

artist. The sparkle and humour of his conversation are crystallised in

his letters, the charming expression of a large and generous nature.

Trained at the École des Chartes, M. de Maulde held for a few years

an appointment in the prefectoral administration. But his tastes drew

him rather to history than to politics. In 1886 he founded the Société

d’Histoire diplomatique, of which he has been the life and soul, and

which owes its success mainly to his activity and enthusiasm. He is the

founder also of the Congrès internationaux d’histoire, of which the first

was held at the Hague in the summer of 1898, when official delegates

from all the great countries of the world met amicably to discuss

international relations in the cold light of scientific history. For many

years he has been a member of our Royal Society.

But it is above all as a student of the Renaissance that M. de Maulde

takes high rank among contemporary scholars. He has made a close study

of that great movement, in regard both to the internal politics of France

and the origins of modern diplomacy, and to the general march of ideas

and the evolution of manners. The results of his studies are embodied in

a remarkable series of works, the earliest being a book entitled _Les

Origines de la Révolution française au commencement du xviᵉ siècle_—a

brilliant picture of French Society at that critical epoch. This was

succeeded by the first part, in three volumes, of an _Histoire de Louis

XII._, and this by the three volumes entitled _La diplomatie au temps de

Machiavel_. Other works in the same series are two volumes on _Jeanne

de France, duchesse d’Orléans_ and _Louise de Savoie et François Iᵉʳ_.

In all these M. de Maulde shows the profound erudition and the just

critical sense to be expected in an historian of the school of Fustel

des Coulanges, together with a literary grace and a lightness of touch

with which the scientific historian is too rarely endowed. His brief

experience of official politics seems to have left him with an urbane

scepticism, a benevolent irony, which serve only to set off his radical

enthusiasm for great ideas and for the great conceptions of art. At

bottom an idealist, he has interpreted with insight and humour the

aesthetic and spiritualist revolution of the Renaissance, nowhere more

characteristically than in the present volume.

With M. de Maulde’s consent the greater part of his footnotes are

omitted—mainly references to authorities unknown or inaccessible to the

English reader, and useless without the complete bibliography omitted

by desire of the French publishers, MM. Perrin et Cie. A few notes are

added within brackets: for these and for the Index the translator is

responsible.

The translator is under great obligations to the Baronne Louise

Dupont-Delporte, who, at M. de Maulde’s request, has compared the

proofs of this book with the original text, and to whose watchfulness

and friendly care heartiest acknowledgments are due. The same task of

collation was undertaken by Mr. David Frew, whose frank, tonic, kindly

criticism has been of the highest value. Thanks are also tendered to

all who in various ways and with constant kindness have given their

assistance in the course of this work, among whom M. de Maulde himself

has laid the translator under a large debt of gratitude.

_August, 1900._

CONTENTS

PREAMBLE

Masculinism of Anglo-Saxon countries—Feminism of Latin

countries. Pages 1-5

INTRODUCTION

Italian origin of the Renaissance feminist movement—Protests

against war, force, the materialisation of the religious spirit

and the hollowness of learning—Recourse to the affections—Quest

of true happiness—Idealism: woman chooses the method—“Love

and faith”—Crusade of love—Worship of life and hatred of

death—Women the motive-force of life—Active and tranquillising

rôle of Italian women in the 16th century—Conquest of France

by the new spirit—General sentiment of the new society. Pages 6-20

_BOOK I. FAMILY LIFE_

CHAPTER I

MARRIAGE

Marriage, its realist character and its difficulties—The

aim of marriage not personal satisfaction—The girl married

blindfold—The father—Marriageable age—Interviews—Reflections of

the father—Ideas of the bridegroom elect—His physical and moral

criterion—His uneasiness—Final crisis—Ideas of Michelangelo

and Raphael—Marriage ceremonies and festivities—Weddings at

Naples, Florence, and Venice—Behind the scenes—Weddings in

France—Brides’ journeys—Moral aspects. Pages 21-44

CHAPTER II

THE MARRIED WOMAN

The genius of motherhood—Marriage a physical science—Domestic

difficulties—Platonism in marriage—Semi-wives—Wives in name

only—Vocation of women for medicine—Women as sick-nurses—as

doctors—Enfranchisement of women as regards medicine—Intimacies

between women and doctors—Women’s medical collections—Hygienic

rules—Neurasthenia—Woman as home-ruler—The châtelaine—Her

management of retainers—The science of charity—Principles of

great houses. Pages 45-69

CHAPTER III

THE CHILDREN

1. _Maternity._—Tendency to small families, its various

causes—Marital misfortunes—How new arrivals were

received—Unpopularity of feeding by the mothers—Children

educated by the mother till the age of seven—Old system

of hardening—New system based on reason. 2. _The

Boys._—Necessity of developing individualism among

them—Paternal education—Growing influence of the mother—College

life—Greatness and decadence of tutors—Understanding between

tutors and mothers—Excessive production of young men of

fashion—Influence of the new ideas—Decline of the spirit

of toil and discipline. Pages 70-85

CHAPTER IV

THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS

Girls brought up solely by their mothers—Old theory

of early marriage—Education, especially physical and

moral—Opinion of moralists and physicians: counsels of Anne

of France—Utilitarian system of Germany—The intensive school:

Vivès; St. Theresa; the Spanish system—The aesthetic school:

Dolce; the Italian system—Louise of Savoy—New theory of late

marriage—Protests against the realism of education—Tutors

of girls—Moral freedom of girls—Protests against what they

read—The story for girls, after Anne of France—The flirt—The

hunt for a husband—Various ideas on that matter—Coquetry,

intrigue, chambermaids—Jean Raulin’s sermon—Open-air life. Pages 86-108

CHAPTER V

THE HUSBAND, AND THE VARIOUS WAYS OF SLIPPING HIS YOKE

The husband lord and master: his absolute authority—The

stick—The wife’s insignificance—The husband’s grievances

against marriage—The wife’s grievances—Beware love!—_Modus

vivendi_—Women dowered or not: growth of women’s influence

on the dowry system—Practical philosophy—Unsatisfied

affections—Wives separated or divorced—Widows—Sentimental

finery—The wife of a dead husband—Classical widows: their

spirit of order and piety—Gay widows—Widows’ virtue—Advantages

and disadvantages of widowhood—Re-marriage—Sincerity of

women’s praise of marriage. Pages 109-135

_BOOK II. SOCIAL LIFE_

CHAPTER I

PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

Individualistic and anti-philosophic spirit of

France—Flourishing of the salons—Reign of money: legitimated

in Italy—The Roman programme—French society—Proposed remedies

against Christian socialism—Anne of France—School of Cardinal

d’Amboise—Principles of sentimental sociology—Social _raison

d’être_ of platonism—Its Florentine origin—Development

of the doctrine—Intellectual aristocracy—Platonism a

fashionable craze—Discussions on the real character of

love—Cataneo—Eloquent Bembo—Petrarchism—Elevation of

sentiments by platonism—Michelangelo—French opposition

to platonism—Triumph of platonism through Italianism and

feminism—Anne of France—Margaret of France and her general

philosophy. Pages 137-176

CHAPTER II

THE SCIENCE OF PLATONISM

Is platonism dangerous for women?—Double system for catching

men: passion and sensibility—To spread love the end of life

and the secret of happiness—Platonic virtue—Criticism of

this virtue in practice—School of Anne of France—Vittoria

Colonna and Michelangelo—Philosophic school—Multiplication and

withdrawal of favours—Love through duty—Love of princesses—The

veil of mystery—Practical recruiting of platonism—Sources of

love or second love. Pages 177-193

CHAPTER III

THE MISSION OF BEAUTY

Science consists in extracting the element of happiness

from everything, first of all from oneself—Beauty a social

duty—Charm has no physical rules—Women slight or the reverse;

blondes; the skin, the eyes—Corporeal beauty—Michelangelo and

Dürer—Portraits of women as Venus—Prudence of women—Artists and

their fancies—Jeanne of Aragon—Margaret of France—Receptions

in the morning—The ‘Innocents’—Art of retaining youth, or of

restoring youthfulness—A lady’s toilette—Fashion—Spiritual

significance of colours—Luxury—Architecture—Taste for fine

furniture. Pages 194-227

CHAPTER IV

THE EMBROIDERY OF LIFE

The science of dining—Table-talk—Balls and dancing: custom of

kissing—Protests of the Reformers—Church—Pilgrimages—Gardens

and country life—Flowers—Pugs and parrots—The horse—Hunting,

Roman and platonist—Hunting philosophised; Budé and Blondo—Park

animals—Nature—Life at watering-places; pure water; gravity

and fun. Pages 228-260

CHAPTER V

INTELLECTUAL RESOURCES

The library—Curiosity divided and dilettante in

character—Taste for tales, jest-books, romances—The old

poets—Music—Instruments, the human voice—Intellectual

music—Harmony—Sacred music—Chamber music—The

orchestra—Discussion on the abuse of music—The

theatre—‘Phaedra,’ Bibbiena—The _Calandra_—Opposition to

the theatre—French ideas. Pages 261-283

CHAPTER VI

CONVERSATION

Art of conversation: its supreme rôle—Women’s

triumph—Tone of conversation—Philosophical

spirit—Variety of form—Subjects of conversation—French

conversation—Quips and cranks—Conversational

dallyings—Stories—Dissertations—Gaieties—Correspondence,

its revival—Family letters—Letters in the grand style—Tone

of letters—Some Italian letters. Pages 284-310

_BOOK III. THE INFLUENCE OF WOMEN_

CHAPTER I

POLITICAL INFLUENCE

Women remain strangers to the keener activities: war,

justice—Women, political in spite of themselves—Isabella

of Aragon—Jeanne of Aragon—Anne of France—Return from

ambition to love—Restless women—Renée of France—Purely

defensive heroism of women—Ladies of Sienna and

Pisa—Isabella the Catholic—Catherine Sforza—Woman

according to Michelangelo. Pages 311-324

CHAPTER II

MORAL INFLUENCE

The good old times—Moral degeneration—Ambition, money—Evil, to

be cured homœopathically as in Italy, or allopathically as in

Germany?—Virtue, must it necessarily be tiresome?—Raphael’s

embarrassment—The antiplatonists—Louise of Savoy, Rabelais—The

work of amelioration by two methods. (i) _The softening of

virtue_—Different systems in regard to marriage; free union;

system of contract; the double marriage—Firenzuola—Marriages

of affection—Secondary platonism, a compromise—Alms without

significance, to lure the human animal—Sipping at love, by way

of Italian dilettantism—The attack—Love a dream—Prayer. (ii)

_The ennoblement of vice_—Attempt at purification of carnal

love—The Italian courtesans, and their moral influence—Tullia

d’Aragona—Imperia—Venice—Francis I.—French system of the double

household—Diana of Poitiers—Bembo in tears—Infatuation—The

feminising of men—The question of the beard. Pages 325-371

CHAPTER III

INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE

Conquest of men by mind—Army of intellectual women—Isabella

d’Este—Anne of France—Margaret of France: her theory—The

friends and guests of Margaret—Intellectual headquarters

of France—Egerias —Difficulty of this government—Vittoria

Colonna and Aretino—Flatteries and compliments—Supervision

of manuscripts—Affection—Pecuniary aid—Necessity of feminine

patronage. Pages 372-397

CHAPTER IV

INTELLECTUAL INFLUENCE (_Continued_)

Results of feminine influence—Literature in praise of

women—Pompeo Colonna—Two schools of taste: passion,

sensibility—Castiglione—Literature of conversation—Fugitive

poems—Temples of high poetry—Literature of poodles and

birds—The ancestor of Vert-Vert—Spanish women—France,

Lyons—Accusation of frivolity—German scepticism—The struggle

in France—For or against women—Timidity of Frenchwomen—Spirit

of the prelates. Pages 398-421

CHAPTER V

RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE

Progress of religious sensibility—Women compared to the

moon—Entrance of the sentimental spirit—Free enquiry at Rome

and in Italy—Philosophic religion—Entrance on the scene of

women as priests, as well as physicians—Religious traditions

of women in France—Decay of faith—Roman liberalism—Situation

of the French clergy—Alliance between women and the

aesthetic clergy—Liberal principles of this alliance—The

_bibliennes_—Aristocratic religion—Writings of the mystic

women: Gabrielle de Bourbon, Catherine d’Amboise—The mystic

writings of Margaret of France, her ideas—Her relations

with the _palinods_—The mystics—The mysticism of divided

application—Direct communion with God—Smiling character of

the new mysticism—Spiritual petrarchism—Correggio—Vittoria

Colonna—Vergerio. Pages 422-453

CHAPTER VI

RELIGIOUS INFLUENCE (_Continued_)

Scorners of mystic liberalism—The savants—Reproaches

addressed to the liberal party: paganism, materialism—Women’s

struggle against these tendencies—The monks: the monastic

spirit—Struggle against the monks: the pros and

cons—Rabelais—Folengo—The German monks—Rising of the

lower clergy against liberalism and aestheticism: Luther,

Calvin—Struggle of the Reformers against women and liberty

of thought—Vittoria Colonna and Ochino—Direction of the

liberal and aesthetic party in France—Margaret of France

and her active rôle—Feminist theory of Postel—Replies of

Luther, the Sorbonne, the theological parties. Pages 454-474

CONCLUSION

Total want of success of the feminist movement—Disappointments

of Margaret of France—Reaction against cosmopolitanism and

intellectualism—The spirit of the Pléiade—Love of free

air—Margaret of Savoy—Fall of the Roman spirit—Montaigne—Last

effects of feminism—The triumph of Death—The mistakes of

the Renaissance feminism—Disappearance of the aesthetic

system—Sensualism of the 18th century—The naturalism of

Ruskin. Pages 475-503

INDEX. Pages 504-510

PREAMBLE

The woman question—what is more absorbing?

What do women want? What do they demand? They have been shamefully

neglected. To judge by the code, there never were such beings on earth.

But the code has hallowed iniquities. The education of women is pitiable.

They ought to know every thing—and are taught nothing. They are deficient

in intelligence—they are too intelligent. They ought to have their

separate careers, their separate circles, their independence—to be the

equals of their husbands, to be men and yet remain women. They ought to

have votes—that, it appears, forms one element of happiness. Many people

in England are even dreaming of suppressing marriage; and it must be

observed that, as Englishmen largely expatriate themselves, there is no

lack of involuntary spinsters, who are by no means the least ardent in

prosecuting the campaign. In short, it is a very babel. Everyone has

something to say. The press, the stage, the pulpit, all resound with

these questions—to say nothing of public meetings, private meetings,

at-homes, lectures. The subject is well-nigh done to death; it has,

moreover, a special tendency to lose itself in mist, and there is no sort

of cohesion in outlook or aim.

Nowhere is this anarchy more patent than in education. How are you to

tell young girls what they ought to be, what they ought to learn and

think and know, when you are absolutely in the dark as to what you want

to make of them? Are they to play the same part in life as men, or to

perform public duties, equal, perhaps superior, to theirs, but different?

Are they to marry early, or late? Ought they to see and know, before

marriage, all there is to see and know? Or is it their blissful privilege

to enjoy the pleasant things of life in deliberate ignorance of all the

rest, and, in their piping time of peace, to turn the divine hours of

youth to the best advantage? Once married, what is their mission to be?

How far will it profit them to have learnt the whole art of household

management? Should they exercise any influence out of doors? If so, what?

Will their influence consist in preserving their good looks and their

skill in dancing? Or is their influence to be a serious thing? Is it to

be intellectual, or religious, or moral, or artistic, or scientific?

These questions jostle one another in some confusion.

And the confusion is irritating, because it compels us to grope our

way haphazard. The education of girls has seriously suffered thereby;

it has been frittered away, has bred a habit of easy contentment with

superficial ideas rather than of resolutely, earnestly, thoroughly

mastering what it is proper to know. The mind, like the body, has its

nervous system, and to obtain its full measure of energy it is needful to

husband its resources.

Now, we may get some light on this complicated problem if we refer it

to experience, or, in other words, apply the lessons of the past. We

often encounter in the world, in regard to history, and more especially

the history of morals, a singular prejudice in the form of a certain

optimism (or pessimism) which imbues us with the idea that we are the

first or almost the first denizens of the globe—that all the generations

whose blood flows in our veins, whose feelings throb in our breasts,

whose traditions govern our thoughts, were composed of beings essentially

unlike ourselves, upon whom things must necessarily have made different

impressions. This idea is not absolutely correct; in reality, we depend

on our ancestors to an almost incredible degree. We are fettered by

innumerable bonds of their bequeathing—bonds of love and hate, and

prejudices of every kind; they hold us in leash as we ourselves hold our

descendants. The generations flit by so swiftly that they have barely

time to transmit life ere they are gone.

Especially in regard to the condition of women, the questions that are

agitated to-day with more or less airiness or vehemence are almost as old

as the hills. At certain periods they have been investigated more closely

than at others, and then learning, philosophy, and experience have said

their say.

The Renaissance was one of the epochs at which these questions pushed

to the front. Like our own age, it was a period of transition; its

conclusions were often very different from our own, but in some points it

bore a wonderful likeness to the present day. The position of women then

underwent an almost inevitable transformation, both material and moral.

Up to that time women had been regarded as inferior to men; opinion was

built up on the practical and utilitarian basis still cherished in the

Anglo-Saxon countries: all modes of activity belonged to the men, while

the women’s duty was to remain at home as domestic ornaments, precious,

but fragile.

Yet society was not wholly averse to granting women what we call the

right to a career. The Salic law was exclusively a French invention, and

the product of special circumstances; in the political world there was

nothing to prevent the acceptance of aid from women, even in the midst of

the gravest perils. It was a woman—and a woman to the finger-tips—Isabel

of Bavaria, who all but ruined us; Joan of Arc was our salvation. It is

not too much to say that, in later years, the honour and might of France

were saved by Anne of Beaujeu and Louise of Savoy. The same thing holds

from top to bottom of the social ladder. In certain towns women might

have been seen taking part in elections in the public square;[1] in many

of the châteaux the lady of the place, in the absence of her husband,

fulfilled the most trying and masculine of tasks, administering justice,

commanding the men-at-arms. Christine de Pisan speaks of this, not as a

right, but as a rigorous duty.[2] Among the working classes female labour

was extensively employed, at a fairly high rate of pay.

But no one saw in this, as the opinion of Christine de Pisan shows, a

direct and natural outlet for women’s activities. A woman was regarded

as the subject of her husband, and his deputy in case of need; hers

was not a personal part; she was only the shadow or the extension of

another person—a sort of half-man, or, as caustic folk said, an _homme

d’occasion, mas occasionnatus_—a man marred in the making. (It must

be confessed that this idea is rather hard on the ladies, and even on

us men, more particularly because Providence does not take us into

consultation in these matters, and all of us, men and women alike, have

the assurance of remaining to the end of our days male or female as God

made us.) On that system, it was allowable for women in cases of absolute

necessity to perform the tasks of men, though the men could scarcely

offer to reciprocate; if there was no help for it, women might adopt a

trade or profession, but that appeared undesirable. All the countries

faithful to these ideas were utilitarian countries, where men had

incontestably the upper hand, and where no great need was felt for lofty

flights.

In the countries of Latin blood and spirit they start from a principle

absolutely the reverse. Women are not at all “men for the nonce”; in the

picturesque words of good François de Moulins, addressed to his pupil

Francis I., “Never forget that women came from Adam’s side, not from

his feet.” They are not substitutes for men, but have their own proper

sphere. Castiglione has given us the typical formula in his famous book

_The Courtier_. “Man,” says he, “has for his portion physical strength

and external activities; all doing must be his, all inspiration must

come from woman.” She is, in his own words, the “motive force.” One

recalls the smiling remark of the charming Duchess of Burgundy: “I am

always delighted when it is women who govern, because then it is men who

direct.” But according to Castiglione, the world ought to show the very

opposite: men should govern and women direct; men act, women think, or

mayhap dream. The former should have the material tasks of administration

and practical affairs; the latter the spiritual and idealist realm.

Looked at in this way, it is obvious how much larger the woman’s part

suddenly becomes, and what supreme importance it holds in the life of the

world. Instead of serving her husband merely as the material replenisher

of his stock and an under-manager for his affairs, the woman will carve

out her own path and enjoy personal freedom, and will be the better

able to lift up her head at home and in society for knowing that she

represents there something more than the flesh; she will be the soul, the

seeker after noble thoughts—thoughts necessary to happiness, but which

the practical spirit of men scarcely permits them to pursue. There will

be no question (to the great disappointment of certain modern aesthetes,

who after all profit very largely by the railways and telegraphs) of

declaring a relentless war against industry, manufactures, the business

of administration; this unpleasing but serviceable sphere must simply be

left to men, and upon this sordid earthly existence must be erected the

frail edifice of general happiness—the true life—a life of enthusiasm,

beauty, and thought; in other words, we must relax the bonds of the

material life, take time to fetch our breath, and infuse into realism a

new and brighter spirit by means of the love of the beautiful. That is

women’s task; in the words of Ecclesiastes, “Their hearts are snares and

nets, their hands are as chains.” They are the queens of happiness, and

they must compel us to be happy and to enjoy the happiness necessary to

us.

With this end in view, the women of the Renaissance formed a league:

they accomplished on behalf of the rights of the heart a sort of _coup

d’état_, the story of which we are about to relate. Finally, no one was

happy after all. But it is interesting to know why.

First, let us explain in a few words how it came about that in a country

like France women were able to assume so important a part. Then, we shall

proceed to show how vast was their effort, how ardent their quest for

happiness, and we shall see why the formula they discovered has not come

down to us.

INTRODUCTION

France is a singular country. We are slightly Greek, half Latin or

Ligurian, very Gallic or very German, and in the West, the country of

an intellectual gulf-stream, we are dreamers—the Celts of M. Legouvé’s

enthusiasm. All of us, whatever our stock, professed in the Middle Ages

to adore women; the author of an old _fabliau_ makes the Virgin ask of

one of our gallant knights the subtle and searching question, “Is thy

lady fairer than I?” But in practice—in other words, in our home life—we

treated women like animals, with the whip.

We must remark also that, during the whole course of the fifteenth

century, France had no time for philosophising: the Hundred Years War

and the awful distresses resulting from it; the iron hand and heavy

taxation of Louis XI., whose rule was regenerative but very severe; then

the Civil War and the Italian expedition—all these circumstances left

us no breathing-space, and are in some measure the justification of an

aftermath of brutality. It was only in the last years of the century that

peace allowed us to reflect, and then activity, prosperity, and happiness

burst out like a lightning-flash. Louis XI., who had clear and definite

rights over France, had dealt with her like a strenuous husband; Louis

XII., who wedded her by chance, treated her with the delicate worship of

a lover who has thrown off the every-day concerns of life.

By what happy chance did the French, till then so apt, whatever they

professed, to value women only on the physical side, take under the

influence of kindly peace and individual well-being a step further

towards the South, and come to think that women might serve as social

guides? The genesis of these ideas was very remarkable.

They came from elsewhere.

During our convalescence, Italy had become transformed. A great

revolution, moral, religious, scientific, and above all aesthetic, had

brought once more upon the arena the two eternal protagonists—the Roman

spiritualists, and the friends of material force, that is, of imperial

Germany.

Men are in general inclined to the side of force; their idea of happiness

consists in imposing their will upon others, no matter how brutally, or

at any rate in donning a uniform—they are born fighters or jockeys.

Women, on the contrary, can only hope to exert direct and effectual

action by the spiritualising of society; and it is not by handing

themselves over to the tender mercies of men, whoever they may

be—husbands, lovers, doctors, hydrotherapists—or by aping the manners and

talk of men, that they acquire their liberty. They are taken at their own

valuation, provided they accentuate their purely feminine qualities.

This was thoroughly understood by the women of Italy, who managed so well

that the crisis turned quite naturally to their advantage, without any

theories whatever.[3] Neither the accepted classics nor Plato gave them

any assistance; they triumphed of themselves, and often at their own

cost, because they accomplished their own education before undertaking

that of others. Many of them, instructed, stout-hearted, nobly generous,

while men were wasting their activities abroad, consistently embodied at

home the superb saying of Christ, “Let not your heart be troubled”—the

only prescription yet discovered for the cure of neurasthenia. People

poked fun at them, accused them of “wanting to wear the breeches.”[4]

Italian husbands were no more inclined than others to fall at their

wives’ feet and proclaim their divinity: they accustomed themselves to

them gradually, almost unawares. It was natural that the disappointments,

vexations and trials of politics or business should throw them in this

direction; what was more fortunate and less expected was that, women

having monopolised all that made life worth living, men one day awoke to

the fact that women were the glory of all distinguished families, and

that, thanks to them, life had become an art, a passion.

They began, then, by shedding a domestic radiance; it was by filling

their own home with light and hope and joy that they began to quicken

the world at large. The science of happiness established itself under

a wholly practical and empirical form, like the science of medicine;

for the heart needs the ministry of healing, a more difficult and

perhaps more delicate art than that of the body. Where can you apply a

thermometer to test the temperature of the soul? Moral sufferings have

the peculiarity of concealing themselves, even when physical collapse

is the result; they are not easily diagnosed, and no one understands

them: and, further, they manifest themselves oddly. It is in the pride

of life, when one feels strongest, that one is weak and in danger; peace

is more treacherous than strife, health more perilous than sickness,

strength feebler than weakness. Or, if one is conscious of the mischief,

one despairs of finding the remedy, which consists of compassion and

generosity. Woman’s medicines are love and hate.

Love—that is to give something derived from herself; to act, not through

that long-armed vulgar charity (though this, too, has its merits—and

is often very tiresome) which aims at heading a subscription list or

presiding at a public meeting, but through that modest individual charity

which humbly and quietly diffuses a little affection, cheerfulness,

and enthusiasm. These are the real great ladies; to them, giving is a

necessity, a second nature. They are born generous. They seek their own

happiness in the happiness of others, without stopping to ask themselves

if their conduct is philosophic.

Hate! They detest and resolutely combat the elements of force in which

men most delight, but which, as women believe, produce the worst ills;

and these are, the power of money, the power of war.

The egotism of wealth they regard as the very source of materialism,

against which they cannot but struggle. On this point the women of the

Renaissance bore the brunt of a long and skilfully fought battle, which

we shall follow in all its phases.

As for war, that is the arch-enemy against which their first blows are

aimed. The little Italian wars of the Middle Ages did not resemble the

vast hecatombs of to-day, but they bred a swarm of atrocities, tumults

and feuds; war is less cruel, perhaps, when it is not a mere pastime. To

storm a place at the opening of a campaign is regarded as a humane act

and good tactics, since in the long run it shortens the struggle; but

the horror of it! Naturally, women are the worst sufferers. In vain do

they push their way through the flames to the feet of some cold stone

angel or some Madonna with her eternal smile; you see poor girls flinging

themselves into the water, and noble ladies going about serenely and

deftly to save what can be saved—their husbands’ lives or their own

fortunes. Many centuries had passed since St. Augustine had offered

his tender consolations to the victims of the barbarians; they might

appropriately have been offered when the French captured Padua or the

Germans Rome, or even at that obscure assault of Rivolta in 1509, when

an Italian captain devoured the heart of one of his political enemies,

disembowelled the man’s wife, and made horse-troughs of their corpses.

Even if we ignore gross infamies like these, war was not more humane. The

historian of Bayard cannot find words to celebrate the magnanimity of his

hero in so generously respecting two high-born maidens of Brescia who had

received him into their house, tended him and healed his wounds with the

devotion of sisters of mercy. And even in times of peace military habits

were commonly so intolerable that quiet folk fervently prayed for a war

to bring them relief.

For centuries sages and philosophers had been expatiating on the evils of

war; councils had attempted to intervene; but war continued to flourish.

The idea of suppressing it seemed a mere Utopian dream.

They might have tried at least to stem its flood by an appeal to the

co-operation of moral forces; but, singularly enough, the more brilliant

the fifteenth century in Italy became in art and intellect, the more its

moral forces appeared to decline.

Christianity, too often sunk into mere mechanical routine, teeming with

abuses, overloaded with observances, had practically lost all influence.

Side by side with a few clergy somewhat above the rank and file in

culture, there was a crowd of empirics who rarely troubled their heads

with thinking things out for themselves; they discoursed, not of love

or hope, but only of faith—a faith which brutish men wished to destroy,

and the more refined few wished to vivify, and which was thus doubly

imperilled. The common people were indifferent, and allowed themselves

still to be lulled by the old crooning melodies to which they were

accustomed; they remained Christian from sheer indolence, like many men

of quality; but it was open to question whether the first shock would

not set them clamouring for a more lively tune—an “air of flutes and

violins,” as Heine said; paradise instead of hell.

As to learning, the cultured were agreed in recognising its failure;

that, indeed, was beyond question. Men were tired of reasoning, reading,

writing, worrying! Learning in tragic dismay sought only to prostrate

itself before faith; or rather, men asked themselves whether learning

really existed. Tiphernus, an eminent professor at the Sorbonne, and in

high favour at Rome, confesses that all this learning so much belauded

and paraded seemed to him nothing but a means of earning a living for

professors, a combination of all the vanities, the technical slang of a

crowd of pedants, critics more or less ignorant, and shameless imitators,

who formed little cliques beyond whose pale there was no salvation. “To

believe them,” he exclaimed, “we are not equal to the ancients”: then

lions forsooth have lost their ferocity, and hares their cowardice, for

Providence shines for the whole world, and it cannot be that man alone

has degenerated! A league of falsehood! he reiterates. Under cloak of

high culture men conceal their vices, and especially their idleness.

Do what we may, we are progressing: every one of us is conscious of a

forward impulsion. The pontiffs of reason, who have painfully climbed the

steep ascent, wish to keep everything to themselves, and to set up their

books as a balk to the world, but all in vain; they will never persuade

us that their collapse is that of nature.

Tiphernus died about 1466. From that time forth science was flouted. It

gave the world, nevertheless, what it was destined to give—fire-arms,

Greece, many admirable things—everything but happiness, which it had

never undertaken to provide. And it was precisely on this point that

the great mistake was made. What, men asked, is the good of learning,

money, labour, or even semblances of joy, if we are oppressed by a life

of contention and heaviness? Why are we born with wits, why should we

rule multitudes, thrill men’s souls, dwell in palaces, if our hearts

are empty? Suppose we wrest Nature’s secrets from her, work every vein

of ore, crop every blade of grass: suppose the race of men to form one

magnificent herd, fat and flourishing, and even peaceably inclined—what

is the good of it all if there is no joy? All things live by love; the

heart makes itself heard above the claims of work, above the intellect,

demanding for life a recompense, a goal. We perish for lack of something

to love; out of mere self-pity we ought to bestow on ourselves the alms

of life, which is love. All is vanity save this vanity, for before our

birth, until our death, throughout our whole existence, it bears in front

of us the torch of life.

Perhaps it might be better if men could be governed mechanically and

reasonably from an armchair in the library by dint of syllogisms.

Unhappily, they love only what pleases them; they are big, greedy

children, listless and lazy if you talk to them of reason, but ready to

break their necks in pursuit of an illusion. Hence it is very necessary

to choose one’s illusions well, and well to employ them.

The eternal illusion is love.

But what _is_ love? That is the real question. If it is a Petrarchan

flower, we crush it under our steel-tipped boots; if it is a coarse

sensation, it crushes us, and we have to wrestle with it. Thus we must

arrive at a new fact—a love which is neither a beautiful superfluity nor

a vile sensual thing; which, in short, is a direct outcome of the worship

of beauty.

We must discover a new sensibility, lofty, strong, fruitful, spiritual,

almost sacerdotal, which serves to link minds together in their common

pursuit of a high ideal. To us French this intricate problem seemed

highly discouraging and perhaps silly, but its importance was recognised

in Italy, the classic ground of love’s quintessences, where even to-day

a candidate for Parliament had better speak of love than of the sugar

bounties.

The science of sensibility is to most men a fountain sealed; they always

fancy themselves to be too robust! They march straight on in parallel

lines; military devotion is their virtue; women alone can serve as a

bond of union, soften and beautify everything, cover with a varnish of

glory and disinterestedness the things that need it. Hence, besides

their mission at home, they may be said to have a social part of the

first importance to play; the more sensible men become to their social

influence, the higher is man’s civilisation.

Now at the very period when France decided to move, the women of Italy

had long since shown what could be expected of women in this direction.

They often flaunted sentiments which are open to the charge of audacity

or naïveté, primitive sentiments, à la Botticelli or Perugino, crude to

a degree; there were manifestly many women of young and fresh affections

who opposed to the simplicity of brute force that charming form of

simplicity, that adorable confidence in the things of life, which the

worship of the beautiful gives to unsoiled souls. They are to the

women of the eighteenth century what Memling is to Watteau. Properly

to understand their spiritual condition we should have to do as they

did—solve the problem of feminism in the feminine way, be women, and more

than women—arch-women.

The fulfilment of their natural vocation, namely, to look after the

amenities of life, was a pretty extensive office, in a country where

art and taste had so prominent a place. But they went farther. They

inculcated moral strength through beauty; they dreamt of raising men,

of plunging into their life like rescuing angels. Some critics say that

the intervention of women is always a proof of men’s decadence, and

that when they save us, we are in parlous need of saving. Unhappily

that is our normal state. Women assuredly represent the Red Cross of

society; it is the duty of us men to be purblind and case-hardened to the

brutalities of life, or even to find a certain happiness therein, and to

remain cold like a sword-blade; women have no right to escape wounding

by the despicable and shameful things among us. They would prefer, you

say, to remain quietly gathering flowers behind their park walls; that

is perfectly true; they only act from a sense of duty, because they no

longer wish to serve as the stake of battles, because there is no misery,

no injustice, no disgrace for which a woman of heart does not feel

responsible. In fulfilling this mission they do not humble us; on the

contrary, we can have no higher ambition than to desire peace, no action

can less degrade us than to bend in respect before the noblest things in

the world—weakness and sentiment. It was the conviction of all the sons

of the Renaissance, and of its great-grandsons (even the last and most

sceptical of them, like M. Mérimée), that sentiment has higher lights

than reason, and that certain intuitions of the heart unfold to us, as

in bygone days to Socrates, horizons hitherto beyond our ken—a foretaste

of the divine. Tired of spinning round in the vain and narrow circle

of reasoning, these men, sceptics in their own despite, come to place

their trust in sentiment, in hope and love: they lean upon women who see

things with the eyes of love. In this they find a certain happiness, and

at all events the secret of strength. No doubt the men of the fifteenth

century did not attach to the idea of number the philosophic importance

given it since their time; it was recognised that in the name of the

rights of intelligence a general should command a whole army, a professor

direct his pupils, a master his workmen; three robbers united against

one honest man, though in the majority, did not appear to have right on

their side; but it is none the less true that intellectual isolation has

always created a situation of difficulty. “The vulgar may judge me as

they please and take me for what they will,” heatedly exclaims Tiphernus,

the professor of whom we have already spoken; “let others please the

multitude! As for me, I pride myself on pleasing two or three.” All the

clever men who speak so eloquently are sure to be in bondage to some

woman; for, after all, the approbation of two or three men, howsoever

intelligent, would not carry them very far, while with the enthusiasm of

two or three women one can at a pinch be satisfied. And thus the work of

civilisation is accomplished; vulgarity, even the vulgarity of common

sense, is hidden under a coating of the ideal, women having a horror of

force, of the law of number, of all that is banal and coarse.

Such was the atmosphere, absolutely new and somewhat overheated, in

which the influence of women developed and flourished. The revolution

was a profound one: hitherto the social system had turned entirely on

the principle of the good and the true, from which a practical and

utilitarian morality was derived. The idea of the beautiful was utterly

mistrusted, and, far from believing in its purifying force, many people

saw in it only a cause of moral enfeeblement. Men had preached a religion

of gloom and manifold observances; it seemed that there was no mean in

life between the virginal precepts of a catechism of Perseverance[5]

and the lowest stages of vice. And now the new generations were no

longer willing to regard earthly happiness as an illusion, nor the love

inculcated by the Gospel as a snare, and flattered themselves on finding

a means of building life upon liberty. A mysticism, compact of snow and

mist, had glorified self-repression, scepticism in regard to earthly

things, the joys of suffering or at least the quest of happiness through

resignation; and its effect had been to raise a select few to a state of

ethereal perfection, and to unloose the mass of mankind to an unbridled

savagery. The moral pendulum had oscillated violently between ether and

mud, mud and ether, a condition of instability like that described by M.

Huysmans to-day.

And on the other hand people wished to live henceforth under a calm and

radiant sky; they talked of taking the gifts of God as they found them,

denying neither body nor soul, but idealising everything. They contented

themselves with affirming the pre-eminence of the soul; apparently the

science of happiness was to consist in abstracting themselves from the

material and the personal and in going straight back to ideas. From that

time it truly belongs to women to govern the higher world, the realm of

sentiment. They will lull the appetites to sleep; they will charm men

of dull burdened soul subdued to earth by daily toil; they will choose

out the refined, the buoyant in soul, to form them into an intellectual

aristocracy: the others will at least be lifted a little above themselves.

The refined are recognised by their thirst for the ideal. At first blush

one might suppose they will be met especially among men of the upper

classes, or at least among men of leisure, for these are fortunate in

being able to look into their own hearts and to follow their own bent,

and in opportunities for gaining impressions. They are not deformed by

drudgery, they have bathed their souls in the great sights of Nature;

the Mediterranean, delicious and bewitching, has cradled them on her

kindly bosom, and has already accomplished for them half of the task by

reflecting the sky in her feminine smile. But no; for lack of discipline,

the idle tend toward sensuality. Consequently, women will address

themselves more especially to the men who can work.

And their scheme will be this. They will interpose, almost like angels,

between heaven and earth; they will love us and we shall love them; they

will gently invert the order of things, so as to make of life a work

of art. They will efface two of the three blind forces which govern

us—Death, Fortune, and Love. If they do not prevent all failures and

weaknesses, they will cheer and comfort them by means of a potent elixir,

obtained from a God of philosophy, like physicians who cure by allopathy.

So many springs are creaking and snapping for want of a drop of oil! they

will pour out that drop. So many noble things lack the sap of life! they

will give them that sap, that vitality, that soul. The sap of love brings

grapes from thorns!

Si l’amour fault, la foy n’est plus chérie;

Si foy périt, l’amour s’en va périe.

Pour ce, les ay en devise liez:

_Amour et foy_.[6]

And thereby the transformation, or at any rate the amelioration, of

the world is to be achieved. Men are not, perhaps, so intractable and

brutal as they pretend; by their own account they would be quite content

to accomplish the journey of life eating and sleeping behind drawn

curtains. We must not believe them. They have shut themselves up in a

bare workshop: throw open the windows, let the sun stream broadly in,

bringing light and warmth and the balmy breath of nature. The effects of

the old system of morality, with its bolts and bars, have been seen only

too often; the loathing of vice, the noble pride of virtue and aesthetic

intelligence are also forces; and they alone can make of our terrible

abode a truly sacred dwelling, open, free, dear to our hearts, the

monument of human affection and of happiness.

Thus, briefly, the conclusion was reached that women can transform

themselves and become the chief element in human society, that of

happiness. Hitherto they had been understudies to their husbands; they

had believed themselves bound to take an interest in the work, ideas,

and tastes of a man, with no other recompense than the satisfaction

derived from a duty done. They had to issue forth like butterflies from

the chrysalis, and to become women full of charm, in order to direct the

affairs which men believed they had in their own hands, and in order to

fascinate, to enfold, to struggle if need be, but without violence or

parade. Then they had to rise a step higher, become objects of love,

propagate love, and bring all things into harmony.

Thanks to these ideas, Italy at the end of the fifteenth century had

taken a marvellous bound towards the beautiful.[7]

Spain likewise had leapt towards chivalry; it was like the raising of

a curtain, so sudden was the change: women, hitherto shut up in their

boudoirs, appeared in all their radiance like goddesses.

France, on the contrary, viewed these new ideas with profound mistrust,

and long rejected them because of their Italian origin. We knew Italy,

but under very false colours; she gloried in rising superior to wealth

and rank, in the importance of women, prelates, and artists in her

life; while we only knew her through merchants and soldiers. Her

bankers established in our towns—“Lombards,” as they were scornfully

called—passed in the eyes of the people for men without a country, for

birds of prey akin to the Jews; our knights, still bewitched by the joys

of their expeditions, spoke carelessly only of a people without weapons

and of defenceless women. The French clergy chimed in with their note

of bitter opposition to Rome. And thus Italy was readily imagined as a

hot-bed of pleasure: but to go there in quest of the philosophic secret

of happiness seemed absurd.

In the intellectual point of view, Italy created a wrong impression

among us through the persons she sent us: professors more or less

broken down,[8] exiles more or less voluntary;[9] impecunious, ravenous,

and pretentious characters,[10] not very philosophic in their attitude

towards their rivals: all those also who rang the changes on the honour

we had had in beating them, the Stoas, Soardis, Equicolas, wonderfully

assiduous in making Louis XII. out to be a second Charlemagne (in those

days Charlemagne was still a Frenchman); Caesar Borgia and his brilliant

retinue, at whose brief passage we looked on in contemptuous unconcern.

Because Caesar Borgia did not take our fancy, or because some of us had

met light women on the highway to Italy, any Italian idea appeared to us

a false one; we shut ourselves up in what Pontanus, Julius II., and other

Italians remaining in Italy called our “barbarism,” and as we plumed

ourselves on our logic, we only abandoned our antagonism to adopt all

the Italian fashions completely and indiscriminately. To that end, Louis

XII. had to oblige by dying, and Francis I. by reigning; so at least

Castiglione, the master of the new school, formally declared after the

accession of Francis. So it actually turned out.

Thus women are queens; they move like fairies. “It is a small thing to

say of a woman that she does not destroy the flowers on which she sets

her foot; she must refresh them. The violets should not droop when she

passes, but burst into flower.”[11]

We do not claim that this system is perfect; our aim is precisely to

examine with the utmost care its strong and its weak points; but it is

certain that, to begin with, by the side of almost all the illustrious

men who then flourished in such numbers, we see the indispensable woman

silhouetting herself, not as tyrant or even director, but as mentor and

guide—as mother, rather, since she brings them forth into the higher

life; or, still better, as light and sun, as reinvigorating, vivifying

warmth: according to the saying of Schiller, “Love is the sun of

Genius.” “Without women,” says Castiglione, “nothing is possible—neither

military courage, nor art, nor poetry, nor music, nor philosophy, nor

even religion: God is only truly seen through them.” This was no new

observation: Solomon had already said the same thing; but we must believe

there were new conclusions to be drawn from it, since men hoped to find

in it the answer to that vexed question of happiness which has been put

in vain since the foundation of the world.

To realise how women transformed themselves, we must follow their example

and open our minds. They had the courage so to do: they looked life

fairly in the face—with their woman’s eyes, it is true, fine, subtle,

and complex; they looked, and often they did not really understand their

own impressions, vivid, and rather strong than clearly defined. Often,

also, under the impulse of these impressions, they acted in the genuine

woman’s way, with tricks and reservations, evading the consequences of

their own theories, going round the obstacle they advanced to attack in

front. Their achievements and thoughts are difficult to determine. We

cannot here, as in an ordinary history, be satisfied with a mere string

of facts; we must play the chemist, analyse these various and complex

elements, and seek to evolve a general formula.

That formula is this: to live, that is, to love life, to attain a mastery

of life without allowing it to crush or dominate us. The attainment

of this result is well worth the trouble of deciphering a few women’s

hearts, even though the handwriting should be less clear than our

ordinary manuscripts. In those days they sincerely studied to love life;

they loved it, rejecting all negations and obstructions, all that

overwhelms and paralyses, scouting death itself! Instead of yielding to

scepticism in regard to things, they wished to push love to the stage

of Stoicism, to lift the heaviest burdens, to gaze upon the star of

consolation which speaks to us of love eternal.

Every woman will begin with her own redemption. She is at first thrown

out into the world while still a child, almost in childish innocence:

very soon rigorous duties, material and oppressive in character, seize

upon her: she is, so to speak, battered and rolled out by very rough

forces—the firm authority of her husband, the idea of obedience, the

trials of motherhood, fruitful in joys, but also in hardships and cares.

Whilst her will is annihilated and enslaved, and her heart often remains

an undiscovered country, she assists with pain and disgust at the

downfall of her flesh—that flesh which has become the abode of pain, a

body of death, to give birth to life.

How is the sudden thrill brought about, turning the dull, torpid larva

into the bright butterfly? How do women succeed in drawing from this

essentially human condition something of the divine, passing from

physical production to spiritual production? These above all are the

questions we must seek to determine.

It must not be expected that we shall present to our readers fair

barristers, or engineers, or professional scholars, still less pedants.

No; these ladies were simply modest women, who took their share in the

humblest duties of everyday life, but discovered, apart from charity in

the material sense, the absolute necessity of another charity, moral

charity for moral and spiritual penury, for those destitute of happiness,

so numerous and found everywhere, even within the walls of the Louvre.

If they accomplished a revolution, it was a peaceful and internal

one. They piled up no barricades, issued no manifestos, launched no

declaration of their rights as women and citizens. Though the laws were

not generally favourable to them, they demanded no amendment of the

laws; the same magistrates continued as in the past to deliver the same

judgments from the same benches, politicians still made their fortunes,

ploughmen still followed the plough, engineers continued to construct

bridges and make roads, notaries to scan the cause-lists. Nothing was

changed, in appearance, in the material course of the world, except that

a moral power had come into being, and that women, like the goddesses of

happiness painted by Nattier, under the cloak of indifference had taken

into their keeping a mysterious urn, whence life seemed to gush in a

spontaneous stream, without the help of judges, engineers, or notaries,

yet continually sending out the current essential to the sweetness and

fruitfulness of the world.

BOOK I. FAMILY LIFE

CHAPTER I

MARRIAGE

There are two ways of dealing with the heart of a woman. You may have

confidence in it, believe in it, regard it as a real element of strength

and happiness, uplift and develop it, touching it then to fine issues

in love, religion, philosophy. These are the lines on which the modern

world proceeds. Or you may treat it as a frail organ of the body, unruly,

incapable of good; you may bind it down, early and with due care, with

all sorts of reasonable chains, the chief of which, marriage, will keep

it fast prisoned, and reduce it to nothingness and oblivion. This, of

course, was the system of former days.

Singularly enough, these two systems, contrary as they are, spring from

precisely the same practical starting-point, which indeed remains the

sole point of contact between them: the principle, namely, that marriage

and love are distinct, and must neither be confused nor blended.

To Battista Spagnuoli of Mantua,[12] poet and monk, in the solitude of

his cloister, marriage shone with a rosy light. Cornelius Agrippa,[13]

with his utilitarian and paradoxical mind, regarded it as a compulsory

conscription of the German type, with no possible exemptions, or almost

none, and fancied that if men would but go in quest of a pretty woman

instead of being so much absorbed with the proprieties and the main

chance, the result would prove far more satisfactory. With the exception

of these two, and a few more or less ingenuous or eccentric people

like them, no one believed in the utility or the possibility of love

in marriage. Caviceo’s romance _Il Peregrino_ was considered sheer

perversity, for after innumerable intrigues and adventures it ends—how?

With wedding bells! So that, according to Caviceo, marriage was to turn

out a romance of cloak and sword![14]

It was universally agreed that no idea could be more absurd, less

practical, more detestable, more immoral even. Marriage was a

transaction, an ‘establishment,’ a business partnership, a grave material

union of interests, rank, and social responsibilities, sanctified by

the close personal association of the partners. To insinuate an idea of

pleasure was to rob it of its noble and honourable character, and to

drag it down into the mire of sensuality. To mingle with it a physical

suggestion was to degrade it; to mingle with it love, the absolute, great

enthusiasms of heart or intellect, was to lay up for oneself disasters,

or at least certain disappointment. “Love-matches turn out badly quite

as often as arranged marriages.” A romance lasts a week, the reality

for a lifetime. No passion can survive the humdrum, the monotony, the

deadweight of matrimonial experience: and what marriage can hold out

against passion? Heart freedom, the storms, raptures, revulsions to be

anticipated on all sides—what amalgamation is possible between these and

the peaceful domestic life which is looked-to to furnish forth a very

solid, united, and well-ordered existence? A certain equality is the

rule of passion: what it demands is a perfect union between two persons

who are mutually attracted and whom there is nothing to keep apart.

What would become of married life under these conditions, without some

directing authority, without one to give law to the other? In regard to

marriage, the time-honoured principle, rigorous though protective, was

this: the husband ought always to take the helm, imbecile, madman or rake

though he be: woman is born to obey, man to command.

Wedlock then is good solid household bread, not by any means cakes and

ale. It is the modest squat suburban villa in which you eat and sleep:

passion is a church-spire piercing the sky—the spire we see high above

our smoky roofs, whence on Sundays and festivals our ears are greeted

with the sound of bells.

To try to import passion into marriage is like trying to pack a cathedral

into one’s bedroom.

And so marriage is to retain its actual character as a simple, natural

function of the physical life, like eating and drinking: the husband a

domestic animal, presented to the woman by the usages of society, the

accident of birth, and the terms of the bargain. There is no reason for

choosing him except in so far as he fulfils these conditions. Do women

choose their family affections? Do they select their father, brother,

relatives? The husband also is a relative, a partner, to whom every

possible duty is owing except that of love. The woman’s duty to him is to

keep house for him, present him with children, nurse him in sickness, and

regard his liberty as sacred.

In short, at whatever point of view one placed oneself, marriage excluded

every idea of personal fancy; indeed, of all the contracts of life,

marriage was the least tolerant of any such idea. Its traditional

character as a business transaction no one would have dreamed of

contesting.

So far as the woman was concerned, the practical consequences of this

principle were very simple. It was not for her to seek a husband, but

merely to accept the man whom fate, that is to say, Providence, had

destined for her. Nothing was more ridiculous than here and there to

find some portionless girl, or one who, like Mademoiselle de Clermont,

was no longer in her first bloom, waxing sentimental and speaking with a

sigh of the “unaccustomed pleasure” of loving the man one married. “This

pleasure,” she says, raising her eyes to heaven like a virgin martyr,

“if it sets at nought human wisdom, is inspired by wisdom from on high;

so fine, so exquisite must it be, that of a truth it is keener than

sorrow at the loss of the loved one—a commonplace and everyday sorrow.”

Whereupon, whatever sympathy may have been inspired by Mademoiselle de

Clermont’s misfortune, her friends cannot help smiling: “So you mean to

say,” they exclaim, “that a woman has more pleasure in the embraces of

her husband than pain at seeing him slain before her eyes!”[15]

The idea that a young girl should submit passively to be married was

almost the only one on which there was complete agreement. Everyone was

thoroughly convinced that in adopting any other course she would almost

invariably be committing a folly sure to bring repentance. If young and

unsophisticated, she would allow herself to be lured and snared by mere

illusions from which there would be a speedy awakening; if she had lost

something of her youth and innocence things were still worse, for then

she inevitably said and thought and did ridiculous things, like poor

foolish Mademoiselle de Clermont. A spinster of twenty-five or thirty,

seized with a yearning for marriage,[16] would be subject to attacks of

mental vertigo springing rather from vanity than from love; one could

believe her capable of the veriest follies and the most surprising

judgments.[17] That was the opinion of all serious women, from Louise

of Savoy to Anne of France,[18] whether they were of matter-of-fact

intellect, spiritual in their affections, or somewhat wayward in their

imagination. The whole mechanism of life exemplified this fundamental

principle: a young girl should have “no choice, ambition, or wish” of her

own; “experience, failing God and the Law, proves to girls the necessity

of discretion, and of not marrying to please themselves; their marriage

should be left to their relatives, or in default of relatives, to their

friends.”[19]

Very frequently, the “best” marriages were negotiated by intermediaries

more or less obliging, relatives or friends. Princes and princesses were

married through the good offices of diplomatists. Indeed, ladies and

gentlemen of the Court did quite a respectable trade in match-making, for

a consideration.

But, after all, the task of marrying his daughter was essentially and

especially one for the father.

For the most part, the father would be only too glad to wash his hands of

the business. In every case he was in a hurry to bring matters to a head,

and believed that in losing no time he was acting in the interests of

his child. She was to belong wholly to another household, since it was a

woman’s lot to belong to her husband, and so it was well for her to enter

upon her new life as early as possible, before she had formed ideas of

her own, and at an age when the paternal household would not yet have

set its stamp indelibly upon her.

In this respect the betrothals, the “marriages for the future”—marriages,

that is, solemnised in infancy for future consummation—were of great

service, and the higher the position occupied in the social scale, the

earlier such marriages were. Kings have even been known to marry their

daughters two days after birth, but such a compact, it is true, was

in the end declared by the lawyers to be immoral and hardly serious.

Indeed, later on, when the time for carrying out the bargain came, some

princes and princesses felt constrained to protest against this arbitrary

disposal of their persons. Happily, such engagements were not of the most

stable kind, and, often enough, political considerations were sufficient

to upset them before any harm was done.[20]

In distinguished families, betrothal was by no means unusual at the age

of two or three. At this tender age Vittoria Colonna[21] was betrothed to

the Marquis of Pescara.

Consummation usually took place at the age of twelve. That was a

favourite age with the husbands; though, according to the best judges,

fifteen was the age when the physical charms were at their best, and

the soul was most malleable—a view dating as far back as Hesiod and

Aristotle. Tiraqueau,[22] the friend of Rabelais, vaunts his exploit in

having wedded a girl of ten. In vain did the French physicians implore

the men in mercy to have a little patience, beseech them to wait at least

until the fourteenth year: they demurred, for it was humiliating for a

father to have a fifteen-year-old daughter on his hands: at sixteen they

would have called it a catastrophe. Champier,[23] one of the gravest of

writers, proposed that after the age of sixteen young women should be

provided with husbands by the State, on the lines of Plato’s system. Some

parents betrayed such haste to get their girls off their hands that they

anticipated the ceremony, handing them over to their husbands-elect on

the strength of a mere promise of fidelity. It happened at Milan, among

the Sforza family, that a mother, becoming apprehensive, refused at the

last moment to part with her daughter on such terms, and the matter ended

where it should properly have begun, in a mutual arrangement, the young

lady being formally placed in charge of her husband to save appearances.

But difficulties like these were always very dangerous. In this case a

dispute arose in regard to the dowry, and blood waxed hot; the bridegroom

broke off the match, and took to wife another girl of the same family, a

child of ten, whom he led off like a horse-dealer returning with a filly

purchased at the fair.

Sometimes, in great families, the girls were married in advance by proxy.

Certain wives grew to womanhood without even making their husbands’

acquaintance.

Urbino is not a great way from Mantua, but the diplomatic agent of Urbino

found it necessary to urge his master, Francesco Maria della Rovere,

a youth of eighteen, to come on a visit to Leonora Gonzaga, whom he

described in the most alluring terms: “If your Excellency saw Madame

Leonora, and the Marquis’s little mare, you would see the two loveliest

things I ever set eyes on. I do not think there is in all Italy anyone

more beautiful or virtuous than Madame, and I am sure no king or prince

in Christendom has a mare to match his Excellency’s.” Ultimately La

Rovere yielded like a lord, and set off incognito to see his wife, a girl

of fourteen years and a half, a merry little creature, pretty, well-bred,

and a pupil of the historian Sigismondo Golfo. She was presented to him

at the palace of Mantua, in the Hall of the Sun. He stepped forward to

greet her, and embraced her in the most correct style; then, on Cardinal

Gonzago remarking loudly that this was a somewhat frigid demonstration,

he went forward again, caught Leonora by the arms and head, and planted a

becoming kiss upon her lips. And then they sat down and began chatting on

the topics of the day, notably a portrait which had just been finished.

To find marriages of mutual affection it would have been necessary to

go down among the lower ranks of the people, in country places; “good

matches were made”[24] as they danced together at the fair or at the

village merry-makings. But in the great world the future spouses were

subjected to a system of “interviews.” Louis de la Trémoille,[25] who

conceived the eccentric idea of escaping the infliction, found no other

means than to introduce himself into the house of his prospective wife,

Gabrielle de Bourbon, disguised and under a false name, as they do in the

comedies. With a widow, perhaps, a little less ceremony may have been

permissible, and then—! In one of his diplomatic despatches Bibbiena[26]

relates with much humour an interview of this sort:

“To-day there took place an interview between the Duke of Calabria and

the divine lady of Forli.[27] Needless to say, his excellency was

admirably groomed and attired in the height of Neapolitan fashion. His

arrival at Bagnara was welcomed with a salute of musketry, and he stayed

to dinner. He spent two hours here with the countess, but it is patent to

everyone that Feo[28] has the lady well under his thumb. His excellency

took his leave very well satisfied; but he was only moderately taken with

the countess: he told me that they joined hands very gingerly, that he

caught some winking and shrugs. And so we are off again, like a cricket

into its hole.”

The final scene was enacted between the bride’s father and the bridegroom

or his parents. It was remarkably like any other sort of bargaining: and

on this subject an old author throws a charming side-light: he urges

paterfamilias to bestow as much care on the choice of a son-in-law as on

the purchase of a dog!

Ah! if the wife is ever to become an instrument of love, there is no

sign of it here! Her father occupies himself with calculations of the

frankest and most practical kind; he has lived long enough to understand

the importance of questions of money or worldly interests, and on this

score is usually more than a match for his son-in-law. It is all very

well for the preachers to extol virtue naked and unadorned! The ideal of

a self-respecting father is an eligible elder son, heir to the paternal

dovecot, a man of leisure, or at any rate a “gentleman,” in other words,

well-connected, moving in good society, with fine friends. Trade he

rather looks down on: he has seen so many failures!—so many substantial

traders have taken to setting up as “merchant gentlemen,” like the

Genoese, and have come to grief! The law, on the other hand, is extremely

popular; in these days there is nothing better than an alliance with a

lawyer. The young man who is waiting for the death of his father to buy

an appointment in the judicature may hold up his head in any company.

Having once come to a decision, the father is at no loss for excellent

reasons both for himself and others. “He plays the guitar well, is

a beautiful dancer, a delightful singer, an excellent writer, a

good-looking decent fellow! He has the promise of a post as Lord High

Whipper-snapper to the King: ’tis a fine thing, a place at Court!

given opportunity and a friend, and your fortune is made.”... “He is

a sensible fellow, keeps a still tongue in his head, answers you only

with nods or Italianate shrugs.”... “Oh! it’s all the same to me. I am a

gentleman myself; here’s to all gentlemen! Zounds! but ’tis expensive,

worse luck! Come now, I’m as good a gentleman as the king. I don’t keep

up his style, to be sure, but, mark you, I hunt when I like, come and

go as I please, bustle about, flog and bawl at and curse my people,

let ’em know I am master; and the hundred or two serfs I have under me

daren’t stir, egad, without my leave.”... “Tut tut! a little less gilt

and a little more gingerbread! My girl marry a lord and then forsooth

go footing it in the mud to canvass Jacks-in-office for a flower-girl’s

corner or some twopenny-ha’penny matter! A fig for your gentlemen!”...

and so on, with endless variations on the same theme of utilitarianism

pure and simple. Perhaps the girl is already smitten with a handsome

officer: no matter, she will have to marry some surveyor from Paris,

especially if he holds a good appointment on the crown lands, because

that provides opportunities of feathering one’s nest. In such matters

the fathers relentlessly enforce their authority, apparently with every

right. The pleadings in a criminal case reveal to us the Biblical

Machiavelism of a well-to-do peasant who had conceived the idea of

getting gratuitous service for ten years from the candidate for his

daughter’s hand and fortune: the period expires, and then the father with

singular bad faith proposes to exact another ten years’ service; but this

time the future son-in-law rebels, and has the misfortune accidentally to

kill his prospective father-in-law, and this brings him before the courts.

The father’s egotism was only equalled by that of the bridegroom elect.

The man who thought of marrying, that is to say, of taking a wife, was a

man of some thirty years (Plato proposed thirty, Aristotle thirty-five);

he had enjoyed his youth, and was now shutting the door upon it. Why?

Often he was not very clear himself: because the time had come, he

supposed, for doing what everybody did. Celibacy was not the vogue: “We

are no longer in the age of the vestals,” as Egnatius[29] excellently

said. And we discover from various sources that the religious vocation

was not very well understood, even among girls. Luckless preachers had

to toil and sweat to prove that virginity was no crime, and that a woman

might quite fittingly prefer the ideal of a mystic marriage to the

prospect of bearing a man’s yoke and measuring out the domestic oil.

Erasmus writing to nuns is too courteous not to speak of angels or lilies

of the valley, but in his heart of hearts he thinks it all terribly

old-fashioned, and has not the slightest belief in the virginal theories

of St. Jerome. With still greater reason, celibacy was not countenanced

beyond a certain age. Luther very honestly regarded it as an intolerable

burden, contrary to nature and the custom of the early church. “It is

as impossible to do without women as without meat and drink.” And so a

man took a wife because he thus fulfilled part of his duty as a healthy

animal; he married because at thirty years the time had come for making

a home and begetting a family. In reality a man married, in a manner,

impersonally, rather for his family than for himself; and all that he

desired was to complicate his life as little as possible in marrying, to

be able to preserve his tastes, habits, hobbies, without the incubus of a

partner.

The worst feature of this business of matrimony was that it was so

entirely at the mercy of chance, which made almost a lottery of it,

and it would have been much more ridiculous for a man than for a woman

to yield to a childish infatuation. The man knew nothing of the girl

he was espousing, either physically or morally. He merely assumed some

likelihood of her resembling her parents, with the result that he devoted

special attention to his prospective mother-in-law; she was the woman

he was wedding. A young woman without relatives to serve as samples and

guarantees was at a discount in the matrimonial market. At the best,

it is always a leap in the dark, something like a step into death; it

is the burial of the past, the first sacrifice of one’s life for the

preservation of the race; the Stoic, says Cardan, knows whereabouts he

is at his marriage and his death. A man’s best course is to take comfort

beforehand, to fix his eyes on the object he aims at, to reflect that the

reason, the mind has no great part in it, and that children are not the

offspring of a woman’s brain.

Moralists had put themselves to much trouble to cheer men along this

difficult road, and to provide them with a series of test questions as an

aid to matrimony. They assured a man that he might be quite easy in mind

if he simply verified eight particulars in regard to the girl he proposed

to marry: physically, her age, health, maternal aptitudes, beauty;

generally, her intelligence, education, family, and dower. Unhappily,

this verification was not easy.

Physically, he could verify nothing but the young lady’s age; for the

rest, the physicians advised him to look to her figure and in general

to choose the best-grown girl; but no one can fail to see how vague

and fallacious was any presumption based on that! True, there were the

attractions of her features to judge by; but those were precisely what

the same moralists urged him to distrust: a serious man, they said, would

never build on that sand. In married life striking beauty is apt to pall,

you come to loathe it, and a pretty woman is rarely clever enough to

bring grist to her husband’s mill—except maybe in trade, when she serves

as a signboard or a trade-mark. Sensible men preferred plainness; it was

only widowers or wealthy dotards who gave themselves as a last resource

the luxury of marrying a pretty woman. Poor souls! they would do better

to think of their rheumatism, their indigestion, the dreadful draughts!

Such a match was that of Madame Dixhomme, a very sprightly young woman

well known in society, who bore the name of an old husband, a shining

light of the Parisian bar, who might have been her father! There is no

help for it. These good patriarchs will listen to no advice, and always

count on coming off well. The world is content to smile, and to look on

their attitude as courageous, not to say heroic.[30]

So much for the physical aspect. In regard to moral principles, there was

one that was firmly established. The man who was bringing himself to the

marrying point was haunted by the spectre of feminine independence; the

terror he felt in anticipation of some enforced sacrifice of his tastes

or whims took possession of him and dominated every other sentiment.

So when he set out in quest of a young wife, he looked for one in his

own rank of society, on his own level, so that she might have nothing

to hope for from him, nothing to cast in his face, that he might owe

her nothing, that she might have no pretext for riding roughshod over

him, but might resign herself quite contentedly to play second fiddle,

regarding this subordination as natural, just as the ivy gladly embraces

the asperities of the wall it is fixed to. The husbands wished their

wives to take pleasure in resignation and to fancy that their woes were

the source of true felicity. The first condition towards attaining this

end was that the ladies should not have a higher, nor even a lower

station in society to look back on.

In a fit of epicurism dashed with respectability you marry your cook,

thinking you are securing careful attentions, a good table, and a warm

bed! Woful mistake! You are wedding a fishwife, who will treat you after

the manner of fishwives, and overwhelm you with coarse abuse: she will

never tire of telling you you are not man enough for her. You would not

find it much more pleasant to marry a woman a little too much above you,

who, at the critical moment, would hold you with an admirable curtain

lecture, and, instead of doing her wifely duty, would discourse to you

for the hundredth time on the splendid matches she had declined, the rage

of her family, your poverty,[31] and so forth.

It is easy to understand with what uneasiness and fatalism all these

considerations, not to mention others, fill the mind of a man who has

reached the age of official paternity. He hesitates long, and makes up

his mind at last with his eyes wide open, knowing that “in the best of

marriages one must expect at least as much pain as pleasure.” Not that

he would maintain that marriage is a mistake for men, but he does think

that “neither joy nor felicity has part or lot in such brutishness.” He

asks advice from one and another, and always runs counter to it. Someone

tells him of a girl with money—she will want to rule the roost; of a

poor girl—she will be a drag; a pretty girl—so much the better for his

neighbours; a plain girl—ugh! that offends his susceptibilities. What

does he want, then? A good manager, a strapping well-built wench: if he

talks of consulting an expert, he is referred to Triboulet![32] He would

much rather have to choose a cow.

It is in this frame of mind that he at last makes his decision. If in

later years he attains to some eminence and is tempted to-write his

memoirs, this business of his marriage will be one of the episodes he

will be able to detail, for his own justification, with perfect composure.

A dispensation of Providence was often necessary to bring him to the

point. This dispensation manifested itself under the most diverse forms.

The learned Tiraqueau, of whom we have already spoken, was struck one

day with the fact that the Greeks and Romans had a very poor opinion

of celibacy, and he culled from Valerius Maximus especially a number

of convincing proofs on this head. Whereupon he crossed the street and

demanded in marriage the young girl who lived opposite; he found that her

name was Marie Cailler, that she was very well-bred, and that her parents

were anxious to get her off their hands. But Tiraqueau was determined

not to suggest a suspicion that a man of his stamp felt a real need of

marriage, and so he dedicated to his father-in-law and to posterity the

unparalleled account of his actual motives.

The hand of Providence was sufficiently revealed in the will of the

parents, or in the cash of an uncle from whom one had expectations, and

who, not having himself taken the trouble to perpetuate his stock, was

determined that the duty should be undertaken by another.

It is curious enough to see Michelangelo in this rôle of the preachifying

uncle. So far as he was concerned, he had long held such peculiar ideas

about marriage that he would have nothing to do with it. At a time

when he had come to years of discretion he worked himself up into a

fine fury of indignation against his brother, who, to put an end to an

old and vexatious law-suit, thought of marrying the daughter of the

opposite party. Later, however, he took it into his head that the name of

Buonarotti must not be allowed to disappear: “the world would not come to

an end, but every living being does his best to preserve his species.”

For this reason his nephew was to marry. But marry whom? Not money, said

the uncle, but a girl of good stock: “to wed a good, well-bred, healthy

woman, is to do a good day’s work,” and to assure peace and quietness at

home.

The idea of a good day’s work did not much take the young man’s fancy:

the prospect of a dowry was more attractive. But the dowry Michelangelo

made himself responsible for, provided they found for him a niece who was

really adaptable and likely to prove a good wife. A match was proposed,

but after dragging on for a time the negotiations fell through, to be

resumed and to fall through again. The uncle was content to give the

nephew a start, and kept himself in the background, though he was all the

time setting the bishop of Arezzo at work in the matter. He knew that

the distinguished people at Florence were at that time in sore pecuniary

straits, a circumstance at which he rejoiced, for it might be expected to

help forward his plans. Ere long, however, the bishop of Arezzo offered a

girl who was no beggar-maid to be wed for charity.

The nephew’s hesitation being at last overcome, he obtained an

introduction to the Guicciardini, one of the principal families of

Florence, rich in the possession of two daughters. All went so well

that the good uncle was soon exchanging excellent letters with the

girl’s father. But on the very first occasion when serious business was

discussed, the bridegroom elect discovered with dismay that the style of

the house, which indicated a respectable fortune, was all a vain show.

Old Guicciardini, excellent man, was very careful to avoid a scandal,

and there and then offered his would-be son-in-law the daughter of one

of his friends the Ridolfi. Kept well posted in these various incidents,

Michelangelo at last became rather bewildered; but to him it mattered

little whether his nephew espoused the Ridolfi or the Guicciardini

provided it was one of the two.

Finally, the nephew wedded the fair Ridolfi in April, 1553, and on

May 20th he poured out all his satisfaction in a letter to his uncle.

Ravished, enchanted, and overflowing with thankfulness, Michelangelo

despatched the promised dowry with a present of jewellery. In April of

the following year a son made his entrance into the world under the name

of Michelangelo Buonarotti; next year another was expected, and a third

the year after. Michelangelo signified his approval by a present of 600

golden crowns (about £2000). That was something like a marriage!

But Raphael, a man of the world, wedded to his independence, took a far

less simple view of the institution. His uncle, a worthy canon, never

spoke to him of a dowry; a stroke of Raphael’s brush was worth a dowry

in itself. Unhappily, the divine poet of maternal love, the exquisite

interpreter of women, weighed and digested the matter like a man of

sense. He does not cease to thank Providence, he says, that he has

refrained from wedding any of the ladies contemplated up to the present.

To-day (1514) he may marry brilliantly if he likes; the choice is open

to him: a cousin of Cardinal St. Maria in Porticu, offered him by the

Cardinal himself—a lovely creature, of good family, with a dower of 3000

crowns, or even more. But “he is in no hurry”; and indeed, that is the

sober truth: men are not in a hurry; and Raphael never married.

So it was quite with the feeling that he was fulfilling an impersonal

and family duty that a man ended by espousing a woman whose attitude was

as impersonal as his own. For the same reason, to consecrate the nuptial

transaction and give it due importance in the eyes of the world, the

marriage was surrounded with an ever-increasing ostentation. The opening

scene was as imposing and brilliant as the subsequent years of married

life were to prove sombre and colourless.

At a later date we find the Calvinists up in arms against these idle

gawds, which they style scandalous worldliness, a “villany.” Nevertheless

there was evidently no idea of glozing over the real character of the

contract; but aesthetic taste, however rudimentary, insisted apparently,

if not on idealising the contract, at least on beautifying it.

Up to the solemn moment everything has been transacted between men.

The young woman appears on this great day for the first time in her

life. If she has been brought up according to the old method, many

people have scarcely suspected her existence. Unlike her husband, who

is taking a step backwards, subsiding from youth into maturity, she

is being born into life. There she is, at the door or under the porch

of the church, standing beside her husband, involuntarily, with no

desires of her own, passive—an offering, as it were, to the race. In

this strong light of publicity she alone seems a little ill at ease,

blushing at the exhibition, agitated at this unknown something which

the rest are so joyfully celebrating. The priest comes down the nave,

just as at funerals, receives the young couple’s whispered “I will,”

sprinkles them lightly as they stand with a little lustral water,

censes them; and then the procession is formed, to wind its way up to

the altar where the nuptial benediction mass will be sung—a long, noisy

procession, ponderous, gothic, all stiff with velvets, monumental stuffs

and gilded draperies; thirty, forty, sometimes three hundred persons,

none but members of the family; but in these circumstances of parade and

pleasure the family becomes extraordinarily multiplied. At the head of

the procession, buried under trappings of superb finery representing a

fortune, the little bride is scarcely visible; she is for all the world

like the clapper of a bell. And verily under that golden robe there is

after all nothing—but a woman.

They leave the church, and there is no crush; the sight attracts only a

few curious folk, a few halt and blind: in those days there was nothing

to draw the overwhelming throng without which no modern marriage is

complete. And the procession crawls on, displaying through the town its

festal finery drawn from ancestral coffers, with a majesty which may

perhaps give the impression of an official pageant, but nowhere indicates

the crowning incident in a love-story. All is significant of a serious,

authentic, arithmetical fact, a practical and substantial fact, a

performance got up for the honour of a family.

It is precisely this which sends a thrill through all who take part

in the ceremony. Under these huge plumes and massive carcanets there

vibrates a delirious but very real joy—the old family joy in pomp and

circumstance, this, too, drawn, as it were, out of the ancestral coffers.

What man is there who, however poverty-stricken he may be, dispenses with

magnificence at his marriage? Perhaps this is the only day—or rather,

the only period, for one is not married in a day—when he will know what

luxury is. There is a truce to care; life shows a countenance all joy and

geniality.

In the rural parts of France the company only rose from table to sit

down again, or to dance under the elms. Deep drinking, love, quarrels,

broad jests, strange customs, such, for instance, as the _jus primae

noctis_, or the drinking-match traditional with the country lads—all

this developed a boisterous gaiety. The bridegroom alone groaned under

it, for among the middle and lower classes it was the correct thing to

invite to one’s wedding as big a crowd as possible. The poor man spent

his time running from fiddler to purveyor, ruining himself in presents

for his friends and the bridesmaids; he was expected to show everyone a

smiling face, to receive his guests, have a word for all, crack jokes, be

at everybody’s beck and call, think of everyone but himself, lucky if at

an odd moment he could snatch a morsel to eat. When night came he had not

even the right of taking his rest; ordeals of every kind lay in wait for

him; and in the morning he was bound to go on laughing, to receive more

visits, and profess himself the happiest fellow in the world. And then

comes the turn of the upholsterers and house-furnishers.

“Happily,” he says, “one doesn’t get married every day.” Divorce will

never number him among its supporters.

Helysenne de Crenne,[33] the great romance-writer, sketches a somewhat

analogous picture of the doings in the great world.

On some fine sunny morning, when the birds are enlivening all things

with song, the groomsmen set out in procession to fetch the bridegroom,

and the bridesmaids to escort the bride. She arrives in a blue robe

adorned with pearls, a diamond coronet on her head. The festivities,

extraordinarily magnificent, last the whole day, concerts and dances

forming part of them; the men hover solicitously about the ladies; some

of them get up a tilting match, ironically inviting the bridegroom to

enter the lists, and his refusal lets loose a flood of pleasantries.

At nightfall the couple are solemnly bedded. At this moment, in France,

the fun is only just beginning. The house seems verily bewitched: not a

bolt catches, not a window but is under a spell; at the most unexpected

moment an avalanche of troublesome visitors bursts into the nuptial

chamber; the couple spring out of bed; the intruders wax hilarious on

the slightest pretext. In her precipitation the bride has perhaps torn

a little rent in her shift; a court is at once constituted to try the

case, and we may imagine the full-flavoured jests that are bandied about,

becoming indeed a little wearisome.

In Italy the marriage was a more solemn and complicated affair. The

law indeed was compelled to intervene with a view to limiting the

expenditure, in spite of which certain Florentine marriages cost

some £20,000, without reckoning the presents—and the presents made a

heavy item. At Venice the witnesses, sometimes numbering forty, could

not escape for less than two hundred ducats apiece. The marriage set

the artistic world in motion. Men of letters came flocking up with

inflictions in the shape of epithalamiums, more or less new, descanting

in Grecian style on the theme “is marriage a necessity?” or farragoes

of pedantry, crammed with allusions to the ancients, full of names like

Lycurgus and Plato, lauding the families of the young couple to the

skies, and comparing the bride and bridegroom to Philip of Macedon,

Mithridates, Dido; eclogues were rained on them, and apologues, and

declamations in Latin verse. All these were printed, and constituted

an authentic memorial of the event. A painter of repute would be

commissioned to decorate the trunk for the brides trousseau; he would

depict on it a story from Scripture or mythology, or a genre scene,[34]

and this formed another memorial, often charming and always worth

keeping.[35]

In the pages of history we find descriptions of so many weddings that

it would be no easy matter to make a selection. King Alfonso of Aragon,

hardly serious as a husband but a very splendid prince, was married

with a magnificence that was long remembered. On the shores of the sea,

the glorious sea of Naples, tables were set up for a company of thirty

thousand, amid fountains running wine and pavilions flashing with light.

In the neighbouring forest a hunt was organised for the Court. The

Neapolitans in their enthusiasm invoked the sun to witness that nothing

more beautiful could ever be seen.

The wedding of Eleanor of Toledo to the Duke of Florence in 1539 is

described with abundant details in a little book compiled for the

occasion. There you may read a description of the triumphal arches, the

statues, the dramatic performances, and find the complete text of the

stanzas, the madrigals and the comedy. The music was printed separately.

One may read also the details given by M. Molmenti of the dazzling

pageants at Venice: the official proclamation in the court of the

Doge’s palace, the prolonged and sumptuous preparations for the festive

entertainments, the canals _en fête_, the façades of the palaces hung

with bunting, the gondoliers in red silk hose skimming the waves,

the armies of servants in gold-embroidered liveries, the bonfires,

the fireworks, the fifers and trumpeters, the serenades, dramatic

performances, balls, banquets with lavish displays of gold plate and

decorations flashing with all the colours of the rainbow—it is all like

a dream; even Veronese would have despaired of painting the thousand

extravagances of this feverish life.

But nowhere do we catch sight of the woman: it is the man who

predominates and plays the leading part. Suddenly the curtain falls. The

girl has become a wife, and then what crudities! what realism! even in

those circles where delicacy is as a rule pushed to the utmost limits of

refinement.

Details on so intimate a matter appear to elude the historian. But though

confidences are lacking, we may surmise the real feelings, the profound

degradation of certain young brides, from the very circumstantial reports

of the ambassadors charged with superintending the arrangements of royal

marriages. These reports, it is true, relate to a very special society,

but it was the highest society, and precisely that which set the fashion.

No one would imagine what singular details are to be found in these

letters.

Take for instance an incident that happened at the charming Court of

Urbino, perhaps the most exquisite of all courts. On the morrow of her

son’s marriage, the Duchess-dowager had the door of the bridal chamber

flung open at dawn, and approaching her daughter-in-law, who bashfully

tried to hide under the bedclothes, said to her: “Well now, my daughter,

isn’t it a fine thing to sleep with the men!” What a compliment from

the Queen of Platonism! No one after this will deny that marriage is

everywhere stamped with the character of unredeemed prose.

That phrase “fine thing” in particular, which on the lips of the duchess

so often denoted the ideal, startles us here with a singular irony.

Or again, what a curious chapter of adventures was that of Bianca

Sforza, who as heiress to an immense fortune had become by proxy the

wife of the Emperor Maximilian! Ambassador Brascha was deputed to the

delicate mission of proceeding to Innsprück to hand the princess over

to her husband, but lo! on arriving they found no one to meet them but

an archduchess. How was he to extricate the lady from this embarrassing

situation?

Brascha wrote to Vienna, striving in the meantime to put a good face on

the matter, giving balls, and so forth.

Maximilian was in no hurry to reply, but wrote at length, asking to see

the ambassador. Brascha set out instantly, taking with him this charming

but singular note:

“Most serene King,

My lord, I find myself under such obligations towards your

Majesty that I am quite dazed at the love you manifest for me.

I could not if I tried express the joy which floods my soul.

Being unable to testify to it sufficiently in writing, I send

Messer Erasmus Brascha to speak on my behalf: and I beseech

your Majesty to believe him, and I commend myself to you.

Innsprück, December 26, 1493.

From Your Majesty’s handmaid,

BLANCA MARIA, with her own hand.”

It was two months before Brascha returned: he was determined not to

return alone. The Emperor was very much occupied: he entertained the

ambassador handsomely, invited him to festivities, waxed eloquent in

praise of the Sforza family, and even mentioned Innsprück with much

urbanity; but all this did not answer the purpose of the unlucky Brascha,

whose exertions, uneasiness, and distress of mind may be imagined. At

last the imperial procession began to move: for Brascha it was a moment

of poignant emotion. Poor Bianca had no prudish reluctance in quitting

Innsprück, where she had been so long eating her heart out, and the

union took place on March 9 at Ala. And on the 10th Brascha wrote, with

a sounding sigh of satisfaction: “At last, thank God, we have got to

the consummation of the marriage, to the confusion of our enemies. I

spent yesterday evening with the king and queen, and we were deep in

conversation up to the time when, the Court having broken up, their

Majesties decided to go to bed.” Brascha was resolved to make quite sure,

continuing for several nights in succession to assure himself. At last he

breathed freely! Ah! such missions as this were no sinecures!

But when the time came for reappearing in public, life glowed with a

new heat and resumed all its exquisite charm. If by some chance a young

bride of princely rank had to cross Italy to rejoin her husband, she saw

along her whole course nothing but demonstrations of joy, smiling faces,

charming freaks of fancy; to give her pleasure these affectionate people

used their one resource—invention. At Milan the poet Bellincione and

Leonardo da Vinci welcomed the young wife of Giovanni Galeazzo in a sort

of firmament, in which animated planets circled round her, loading her

with compliments the while. Plato in his raptest moods never imagined

anything sweeter or lovelier than certain tokens of homage paid by the

Italians to a new sovereign lady. On returning to their domains the Duke

and Duchess of Urbino found, ranged upon a hill-slope, the ladies of

the city exquisitely dressed, and the children bearing olive-branches

in their hands. As soon as the bridal party came in sight a screen of

mounted choristers rose up before them, accompanied by nymphs in antique

garb; dogs started off in pursuit of hares let loose for them; the hills

resounded with the strains of a cantata specially composed; the Goddess

of Mirth in person descended the slope and offered the duchess her

congratulations and good wishes.

These affectionate welcomes, this show of cordiality at least warmed

the sick and sad heart of a young wife, and indicated at the outset her

path of safety. Yes, it was a pious and salutary work to envelop in

an ideal world this timid child of nature who was being consigned to

a lord and master. It would have been barbarous to check this joy in

external things; to show the poor girl from the very first the cutting

of bread-and-butter as the be-all and end-all of a woman’s life; to shut

out from her view all that lends brightness and colour to the world. On

the contrary, thanks to the smiles with which heaven and earth greeted

her, a woman of intelligence and sensibility entered upon her mission

with a stout heart, in the vague anticipation that fortune was bound to

smile upon her still. Where was the harm? There was nothing in her hopes

to prevent her from treading the stoical path of destiny and lending

herself to the material functions that devolved upon her. But her eyes

were opened, she perceived the dawn for her of a life which her husband

had long known. It was now her turn to blossom out; she became conscious

of her soul, and understood that she too was to be entitled to her youth.

CHAPTER II

THE MARRIED WOMAN

“Woman, in my judgment, is the stumbling-block in a man’s career. To love

a woman and yet do anything worth doing is very difficult, and the only

way to escape being reduced by love to a life of idleness is to marry.”

There is nothing new in this reflection, put by Tolstoï into the mouth of

one of his characters.[36] Such was the theory of the Middle Ages—fatal

love! The new-fledged husband was under no illusion in the matter: he

had married to cure himself of love, or rather to have done with it for

ever, to turn from woman and towards higher things; he would never have

imagined any connection between his marital duties and his soul. First

and last, wedlock had no romance for him. Marriage was the worn and dusty

highway of materialities.

Nor did the expectations of the young girl soar any higher. Shown the

simple truth by the solemn personages to whom she owed her upbringing,

sedulously guarded against any kind of illusion, she knew all there was

to know about her new duties, and in regard to these it was thought

peculiarly necessary to arm her against errors and enthusiasms that might

bring disappointments in their train. Marriage she had always looked upon

as a natural function with excellent precedents, and she had studied its

rules, in their rudiments at least, so as to be able to guide her steps

intelligently in a career that had necessarily its technical side.

This was why Champier the physician compiled expressly for Suzanne de

Bourbon—that peerless flower among noble maidens—a little treatise quite

foreign in its nature to what is in these days called “literature for

young people.” Yet it must be confessed that this treatise, frankly

physiological as it is, constituted the best imaginable safeguard against

being swept away on a flood-tide of passion and folly. Champier lays

down, as rigorously as though stating an astronomical law, various rules

for his lady’s guidance in the most intimate relations of wedded life;

prudence, moderation, and regularity are his text, and he gives point to

his precepts by setting against them a menacing array of human ills—gout,

anæmia, dyspepsia, enfeeblement of the sight.[37] Prosing preachers of

this sort, let us add, addressed themselves chiefly to the women, and

their exhortations were felt to be necessary and moral in the extreme.

Marriage being a partnership to perpetuate a stock and beget children,

the wife was naturally expected to accept without wincing the

consequences of the contract—consequences it was as unreasonable to decry

as to extol. All around her she saw reminders of the high sacredness

and dignity of her vocation: genealogical trees spread their vast

ramifications over the walls, and, while invoking the past, gravely,

almost solemnly shaped for her that gigantic note of interrogation in

regard to the future which distinguishes man from the brutes: the whole

taking deeper significance and impressiveness from the emblematic figures

of Wisdom, Honour, Reason, with which some artist had illustrated them.

“Marriage is a holy and religious bond; and the pleasure a man hath of

it should be a moderate, staid, and serious pleasure, and blent somewhat

with severity.”[38] To attach oneself to this pleasure, to make it the

axis of one’s world, would have seemed beneath contempt. By the favour of

Heaven, a wife could still retain her self-respect and become a moral and

religious soul.

On these lines the straight path was marked out: in regard to

circumstances, neither revolt nor rapture; between the two partners,

neither love nor hate, but an amicable understanding, a little stiff

perhaps, and wholly practical. To stray from this path was only to fall

into difficulties and mistakes.

To what extent this wary walking really availed is a question upon

which opinions have always been pretty evenly divided. Marriage was

the time-honoured target at which everyone had a prescriptive right

to discharge the shafts of his wit; for all that, marrying and giving

in marriage proceeded apace, and the institution went on perpetuating

itself imperturbably. It may well be believed that, at an epoch when

conversation, free discussion, and a mania for philosophising were in

vogue, no one lost an opportunity of airing his views on the surprises

and the advantages of wedlock; and indeed it is at this time that we see

the first indication that the shafts of irony were taking effect, and

that the target, after all, was showing signs of wear.

Here, too, there emerges more clearly into view a truth which the reader

will already have seen faintly suggesting itself in the careful and

impartial sketch we have endeavoured to draw of the beginning of life

for women: the truth, namely, that the ascendency of man developed in

him strange principles of egotism. It might be supposed that married

women, handed over, as we have shown, like so many sheep, would pitifully

cry out against their sacrifice, while the husbands would be abundantly

satisfied with the results of a “deal” (if the word may be allowed)

effected at so little cost to themselves. But such was not the case:

humanity is so constituted that, sunk in abject slavery, with no glimpse

of anything beyond, it will hug its chains; while the more freedom it

enjoys, the keener grows its appetite for freedom. So long as we are

sure of a to-morrow, and believe that somehow or other our lot may yet

improve, the present does not count: but, for us to love the present,

the future must stretch out before us into the gloom of the unknown,

and this, no doubt, is why Providence imposes on us the great enigma

of death. So it was with marriage. While the women were content, the

husbands railed at it. Monogamy irritated them. Despite all possible

precautions monogamy almost inevitably endows the wife with a certain

influence. Polygamy alone, in virtue of the classic principle _divide et

impera_, can assure to a husband an undisputed authority, and that is

why, at bottom, to many men who dared not avow it, polygamy appeared the

most natural of luxuries. There are savants, too, who will prove to you

that in many countries it was easy to slacken the marriage bond, turn

it, even, to profitable account; that it was regularly let on lease for

a month or a year. The Babylonians would rather have lent a wife than an

ass.

With women, on the other hand, we remark a resignation springing largely

from the code of perfect realism by which their marriage was regulated.

They find themselves face to face with a fact; what is done cannot be

undone, nor can it be done over again. The transaction is completed: all

that remains is to pay the price. Once they can think themselves quit of

that obligation, the problem of liberty will present itself to them too,

though not, of course, under the forbidding aspects of those ideas of

divorce, remarriage, polygamy, that are floating in the air. In the eyes

of the women marriage kept its character as a sacrament: the view that it

was a contract freely entered into between their husbands and themselves

appeared hard to accept, for several reasons. In the first place, little

faith was put in that system of social contracts of which we are so

enamoured to-day. Life was incomprehensible without a large admixture of

fatalism. We are not, we cannot be, parties to a contract when we come

into the world; but certain laws have already had their way with us, and

to them we continue subject. In marriage, one of those laws, there is

nothing irrational in the accessory notion of a contract, and yet, even

in marriage, with every imaginable liberty of choice, the real substance

of a contract is not found. Is not this contract specially complicated

with latent circumstances of time, place, motive, which act unequally

upon the two parties? In its very nature it involves so much that is

unknown, so much that is fortuitous, admits of so many causes of error

and instability, that it barely comes into the category of reasonable

presumptions, much less of contracts.

Erasmus is astonished that women are still to be found willing to submit

to all the trials of maternity; and indeed it would perhaps have

been difficult to find such women, if, before venturing out upon so

perilous a sea, they had not been able to insure themselves against the

selfishness of men by a high conception of duty, stronger and, above all,

more durable than the idea of a contract. They needed no persuasion to

beware of self-delusion, to contemplate marriage under its most leaden

hues; but yet they wished to retain for it its character as a refuge,

rude but trustworthy. They derided the chimerical theories of Plato on

free union; in short, all things considered, not one of them regretted

having been married in the time-honoured way, since no other means had

yet been discovered of assuring an honourable motherhood. Unions of

policy and position, they very well knew, do not bring about a fusion of

hearts; too often they become “suburbs of hell.” But what is to replace

them? Marriages of passion and love? As a matter of fact, says a caustic

critic, since as mere men we are no longer of any importance, or at

any rate are all of equal value in the eyes of women, the question is

becoming much simpler: a princess will be able to marry after her own

heart, to wed a prince, or a peasant, as there is not a pin to choose

between them. Where is the advantage? retorts a sage: love matches

turn out as ill as the others. The only philosophy of marriage which

women must cling to is that in this matter there is no philosophy. It

is useless to attempt to sublimate it; what they have to do is to make

the best they can of it, and satisfy themselves with a sort of virtuous

affection, in accordance with the unfathomable designs of Providence.

“Marriage,” says Margaret of France,[39] “should not admit of any

objective either of pleasure or of self-interest: all the same, it is not

a perfect state; let us be satisfied with wisely accepting it for what it

is, a make-shift, but reputable.”[40]

Thus the conclusion to which women tend to arrive in their cogitations

on married life—and who have a better right to cogitate?—is that though

they may submit to a husband, they no longer think themselves bound to

adapt themselves to him, to identify themselves with him at every moment

and in every caprice, or to worship this fellow-mortal with the same

superstitious veneration as of yore. They see him as he is, a man, with

certain qualities, human, in the nature of things, and certain defects,

naturally far from divine: a physical creditor, whose claim they do not

contest, but are well able to measure.

At the risk of appearing rash in a matter wherein mathematical proofs are

so difficult to produce, we think we are justified in asserting that the

majority of married women (we are speaking of women of position) desired

to render their physical subjection as light as possible, regarding this

obligation almost as the seamy side of life, an error of Providence.

And they had so much the better of the position that, as rumours of the

little domestic dramas always got abroad sooner or later, the ladies

were almost certain to have the laughers on their side, especially in

France. The French refused all rights to the married woman, but they

always took her part, even when she was in the wrong, precisely because,

as they looked at marriage, the husband represented the government and

the wife the opposition. Domestic squabbles fed the stage, furnishing

certain types which were very popular—to wit, the man who married too

young, or the man who married too old, the latter a special favourite

since the time when good King Louis XII., sacrificing himself to a

dynastic ambition, espoused the lady he called his “torment.” The

husband’s part, then, is in truth difficult enough to play. If he is

intellectual, platonic, there is no pity for him, people are all so busy

finding excuses for his wife. In regard, also, to a husband who puffs and

blows and is irritably jealous, the “new right” grants to the wife the

fullest absolution. Everyone knows that a silk dress is not enough for

happiness!—and because a husband is pleased to be deaf or blind, it is

not to be expected that the whole world is to be blind and deaf too.

On her side, a wife had the right to stand on her dignity and play the

prude. In general, the average worthy man, a little vulgar perhaps, but

a good father and an excellent man of business, is not a great success

in his domestic relations, and in insisting on what he regards as his

wife’s mission, the bearing of children, he wofully deceives himself. My

lady’s mission is to be the lady of the house: as for him, let him go to

his office and “think himself too much honoured that God has blessed

him with such a wife.” If it is a question of receiving fine fashionable

friends, people from Court, madam has incomparable graces; but any tender

approaches on the good man’s part are sure to bring on a fit of the

megrims.

There were a multitude of good, excellent marriages which were only half

marriages. Appearances were saved in the eyes of the world, and even in

the eyes of the married couple themselves; they both had the good taste

to drift along without undue strain, gathering merely the natural fruits

of their association. Both enjoyed their liberty: the wife was unmolested

and her own mistress; the husband travelled, sailed the seas, or went on

embassies, striking up flirtations in his progress from court to court,

and doing his household honour by his successes. Castiglione,[41] a

perfect type of the man of the world, saw his wife at intervals, and was

always on the best of terms with her; evidently it never occurred to him

to take her about with him, but he always showed her in the most delicate

manner how much he valued her. At Rome he amused himself by putting into

verse a letter he was addressing to her. It was at Rome, too, in August

1520, that he learnt of her death in giving birth to a daughter; just

before she died the tender-hearted woman mustered strength to smile for

the last time, and to dictate one more charming little letter.[42]

Montaigne has a good deal of pity for the women who were subjected to

these capricious humours: “They are verily in worse condition than

maids and widows. We want them at the same time hot and cold.” He does

not remark that, for some reason or other—disgust of too pronounced

a materialism, longing for peace and quietness, coquetry, scorn of

sensuality, or what not—the majority of women only accepted wifehood for

the sake of motherhood, and would be more than satisfied if they could

be virgin-mothers; some considered themselves almost as idols sacred

from human touch. Pope Alexander VI., for all his humour and his nimble

wit, was very far from understanding all these refinements, and this

singular loathing of the flesh. In 1502 he expressed himself pithily and

forcibly, but vainly, about the amusing opposition of the Duchess of

Urbino, who, when she was offered urgent and incontestable reasons for

the annulment of her marriage,[43] absolutely refused to exchange her

husband for a French husband of unimpaired vigour, whilst the duke, the

cause of this contention, accepted a cardinal’s hat. Laugh as Alexander

might, with all his keen sense of humour, at what he called “fraternal

magnanimity,” this simple incident at Urbino contained the germ of an

entirely new code. Other ladies carried the sentiment of ‘fraternity’ to

preposterous lengths. Paul Jove[44] himself, who belonged body and soul

to the philosophic world, gives vent to his feelings when he records the

remarkable feat of Julia Gonzaga, Countess of Fondi, who was left a widow

after many years of marriage without having ever yielded on the essential

point. Marriage so understood becomes a mere matter of policy or business.

We have no wish to dilate on this delicate problem of bodily

emancipation; but it so constantly comes before us, and it is especially

of such vast importance in regard to the further development of the ideas

current in society, that it is hardly possible to avoid doing so. The

preachers, who at one time had ardently urged the severing of family ties

as inexorably demanded by religion, are now seen proclaiming from their

pulpits, with the same appeal to religion, a totally different doctrine,

and inculcating mortification of the flesh of quite a novel kind. We

know the story of an excellent pharmacist of Pau “who never had anything

to do with his wife except in Holy Week,[45] by way of penance.” Even

in remote country places it became the vogue to occupy separate rooms.

There was no attempt at disguising the fact, and a good deal of joking

on this casuistical refinement went on in polite circles. It was one of

the points on which Henri d’Albret was not backward in rallying his wife

Margaret. She flung back the half-laughing, half-angry retort: “Henri,

perhaps the lady whom you think so much to be pitied might find some

solace if she pleased. But let us dismiss the pastimes in which only two

can share, and speak of what should be common to all.” Then Henri, taking

as was proper a higher tone above these trivialities, addresses humanity

at large: “Since my wife has caught so well the drift of my remark, and

takes no pleasure in a pastime for the individual.... I give in.”[46]

We have often read the eulogies on Margaret of France, sister of Francis

I., and the compliments paid to her conjugal virtue. There is no reason

to gainsay them, but it is well to note of what stuff her virtue was

made. Henri II. could write: “Without me, she would never have returned

with her husband.” And, in truth, she made no secret of it.

One day when someone was relating a scandalous freak on the part of a

faithless husband, Henri d’Albret said to her with affected tenderness:

“I assure you that I shall never undertake so great or so difficult an

enterprise. I shall not have spent my day badly if I succeed in making

you happy.” And Margaret made the somewhat dry and aesthetic reply: “If

mutual love does not satisfy the heart, all else will fail to do so.”

Towards the end of a certain December the Princess happened to be a

little out of sorts; whereupon she wrote boldly to her brother: “I got

this on St. Firmin’s day (September 25), as likely as not.” This recalls

a certain bet that M. de la Rochepot made with Queen Eleanor, wife of

Francis I. La Rochepot maintained that the queen was drawing the long

bow—that she was not really so free with her favours as she gave people

to understand. However, he forbore like a gallant gentleman to insist,

and surrendered to the contrary testimony of men who had the best reasons

for knowing.

But now, in the midst of this cold, nicely balanced existence, or these

serious misunderstandings even, a heavy blow falls suddenly in the shape

of illness: the husband is struck down. Instantly a change comes over

everything. Womanly kindness gushes forth as from a natural spring. The

wife’s concern is still, as is always the case in matrimonial questions,

only with the bodily realm, but the soul breaks through. For the first

time the wife asserts herself, less perhaps out of affection for a man

from whom only yesterday she held aloof, than in obedience to a natural

instinct for combatting material things, pain and disease. Differences

of temperament, character, position, philosophical views, all drop out

of sight: sensibility alone shines forth triumphant. The house is in

commotion, messengers scour the country in search of distant physicians,

the chaplain sets off to arrange for masses and votive candles. See,

at the bedside of Pierre de Bourbon, the great Anne of France, once

the haughty regent of the kingdom, now fixing her eyes steadfastly on

the sick man, taking no rest day or night, declining aid from anyone,

measuring out potions and remedies with her own hand, administering the

doses herself, warming the bed, doing for the patient little offices of

infinite delicacy without a touch of constraint; an eye-witness goes so

far as to say that she “made it her delight.” The wedded wife is not a

love-sick girl, a scribbler of verses; she has no need of imagination,

of airs and graces, of enthusiasm: here she is seen in all her grave

nobility. She is a sister of mercy. The woman who could not pardon a

cross-grained husband resigns herself without hesitation to a future of

poultices, cooling draughts, and rheumatism. Some there are who endure

this lot for long years without flagging, some who encounter it at the

very outset of their married life. It is their natural vocation.

The attraction exercised on women by suffering is one of the most

singular phenomena in the realm of psychology. It is as evident as the

attraction of the magnet for iron. Women are born nurses and doctors,

with a passion for tending the sick, for dedicating themselves with all

their wealth of tenderness, for devoting their delicate fingers to the

binding up of wounds. Between this passion and the passion of love there

is an intimate relationship; in both is involved the bestowing of life on

man; but in this case the problem is very simple, presenting none of the

moral complications of love. Matter-of-fact and practical women are not

the least strongly convinced of the vocation of their sex for medicine.

So general was the impression in regard to this that a certain pious

author advised that the doors of the medical school should be thrown open

freely to women, that they should be taught all that men were taught,

indeed a little more (Greek and Arabic), and that they should then be

sent off to the Holy Land to aid in the conversion of the infidels.

But why not keep in France women so well-instructed? The reader no doubt

has an inkling of the reason: the physicians are to be reckoned with,

jealous guardians of their monopoly, already exasperated against the

surgeons, apothecaries, and women, “nonentities,” who are meddling with

the care of the children. They are masculine, these physicians, men to

their finger-tips: to kill, or at any rate to physic one’s fellows, one

must needs wear breeches. “The woman who meddles with our trade is a

silly creature.”

Women did meddle with it, nevertheless, out of devotion, and above all

out of self-respect. And on this matter we must take note of ideas

absolutely the reverse of those which prevail to-day.

To women it would have appeared the deepest humiliation and the basest

servitude to depend on men for the thousand intimate and special

attentions which they so often found necessary in regard to their health.

Undoubtedly they held that modesty is to some extent a relative term, and

that “intentions” count for something in it. So they willingly permitted

all sorts of friendly, spontaneous, personal familiarities, so long as

they were in good taste; but even when sick and suffering they were

determined to remain women; and the idea of surrendering their womanhood,

of passing like cattle under the hands and eyes of a horse-doctor on

the mere pretext that the modesty of a girl or a woman is a remnant of

savagery, and that all stand-offishness in this respect appears almost an

insult towards a practitioner, did not strike them as a matter of course;

they repudiated it absolutely; and, moreover, the Roman, Greek, and

Arabic ideas, then so fashionable, strengthened their resistance.

So far from believing that a man had more rights because he was paid, or

because his senses had become deadened by constant wear and tear, they

regarded both these circumstances as adding to their humiliation and

confusion. For their special maladies they had recourse to women only,

and the very fact that in such cases physical pain is complicated with

moral pain and weariness of soul, led women of the world, great ladies,

to take up a work of charity of real delicacy and refinement, to devote

themselves to a thorough study of this class of maladies, so that they

might spare their sisters the unpleasantness of mercenary attentions.

Nothing could be more gracious or more natural.

Science at this period was science, and a man was a man. He was as much

entitled to study medicine, and to practise it, even without a diploma,

as to study any other branch of knowledge—history, mathematics, or

chemistry. To have dragged out a few years on the benches of a school is

assuredly not a bad means of learning, but it is not the only one, and

it ought not to be regarded as warranting for the rest of a man’s life

a positive presumption of his universal knowledge and impeccability. In

medicine, as in other things, so-called amateurs[47] have been known

occasionally to bear the palm over professionals. Now, what science can

women more naturally cultivate, what answers better to their requirements

in regard to refinement and equality, what more legitimately emancipates

them? The practice of medicine was their first conquest, the “great

charter” of their freedom. A number of women, particularly women of

distinction who had charitable hearts and leisure for study, in a certain

sense practised medicine. A celebrated savant, while gently expressing

his regret, dedicated to Diana of Poitiers,[48] as to a colleague, with a

thousand professions of scientific esteem, a treatise on the diseases of

women.

Except that they watched for the propitious moment for regaining the

upper hand, the physicians gave in; they left the patient in the

hands of a woman, contenting themselves with writing a prescription

on the particulars reported to them, thus securing at least formal

recognition—and their fees. Even from professorial chairs medicine was

extolled as a lovely and philosophic thing; and in an official ceremony

at Paris a “prince of science” (to adopt a modern term) declared to a

large audience that Nature has a certain feminine complexion, that she

has been specially bountiful to women and endowed them more highly than

men.

It should be remarked that if the physicians had the good sense not to

quarrel with the formidable power of women, but to come to terms, that

result was probably due to the fact that they were themselves in the

throes of a crisis which could not but inspire them with great prudence.

People were up in arms against them; they were no longer content with

rehashing stale jokes;[49] the sick expected to be cured. Further,

complete discord reigned in the scientific world; men vied with each

other in flinging about opprobrious epithets like “fool,” “mountebank,”

and “specialist.” Paris remained faithful to the traditional and

philosophic spirit, while Paracelsus burnt the works of Galen and

Avicenna. Many men dismissed medicine as a purely empirical science with

no theory behind it, and capable of being mastered in six months. The

activity in scientific circles only added to the intellectual confusion.

Opinion went so far as to hold doctors responsible for their actions, and

to maintain that their repute should be strictly proportionate to their

merits.[50] There were not wanting sceptics, even among women. Margaret

of France, in one of her comedies, brings on the scene a sick man who,

after being tossed about like a shuttlecock between his doctor and his

wife, is ultimately cured through the prayers of the cook.

Nevertheless, a real bond of friendship and brotherhood was in most

cases established between the lady and this stranger who called himself

a doctor. It was a sort of domestic and personal intimacy. Women, as we

all know, are greatly in need of a directing authority; they love also

to be made much of, as certain doctors understood wonderfully well;

like that doctor who never met a woman without attempting to worm out

of her some confidences as to her health, and when someone expressed

his astonishment, “Aha!” said he, waggling his head, “even well-corked

bottles sometimes have cracks.” In reality, he fancied that his

solicitude would be highly appreciated.

The doctor who won a lady’s esteem became her friend. He would write to

her asking how she was, and addressing her as “my sweet princess”; if he

learnt of her illness, he flew to her; if she died, he mourned her. His

sentiments sometimes outran his interests; a noble lady died, and among

her effects were found formidable doctor’s bills she had forgotten to

settle. If in special cases there were limits to the confidence patients

placed in their doctor’s skill, there remained still a vast enough field

for private friendship, which lent itself only too well to scandal.

Official recommendations to hold medicine in respect “on account of

its necessity” came from the pulpit. Priests and doctors gave each

other mutual support and divided the empire between them.[51] Scholars

unearthed the old story of a medical student who bore himself like

an angel while attending an Aspasia. But in spite of these little

testimonials, ill-natured folk like Ronsard, Brantôme and others

continued with more or less virtuous indignation to make doctors their

butt. Dolce[52] amuses himself by relating the misadventure of a young

husband, who, having confided to his physician his intense longing to

become a father, was ere long lodging with the courts a complaint that

he had too speedily obtained his wish. The public was always ready to

laugh at stories of this kind. Medical science was often considered as

an instrument of corruption. Champier, who practised at Lyons, in good

set terms accuses his fellow-physicians of becoming veritable agents of

demoralisation, and of perverting their patients’ moral sense.

So far as medicine was concerned, women showed a becoming modesty in

their ambition. Many medical women were women of the old school, who

acknowledged the superiority of men. They confined themselves to a

well-defined field of study. As soon as she marries, a woman will join

battle with sickness; by and by she will have children to take care of,

then it will be her duty to preserve her beauty and charms. Here is

a medical field well marked out for her. On other points she remains

subordinate to men, leaving to them in particular all lofty speculations.

An eminent, if not the foremost place in the medicine of the schools

was then held by astrology, to which the physicians, wise in their

generation, owed a great part of their prestige.[53] Assuredly it was

not hard to believe, with Plato and the Christian church, that the

universe does not end with man, and that above us there is a hierarchy of

supernatural beings, imperceptible to our senses, on whom we depend, and

whose wings sometimes seem to brush us as they pass: those beings whom

Ronsard has invoked, in verses of so much beauty, as witnesses of his

love:

Ailés démons, qui tenez de la terre

Et du haut ciel justement le milieu,

Postes divins, divins postes de Dieu.[54]

Many physicians held that the noblest part of their art consisted

in penetrating if possible the mystery of the influence of these

supernatural forces.

Further, how could they but discover, even in the natural order of

material things, a universal harmony, intimate relations between the

health of women and the ocean tides and the revolutions of the heavens, a

thousand bonds—

D’innombrables liens, frêles et douloureux,

Qui vont dans l’univers entier de l’âme aux choses.[55]

as M. Sully-Prudhomme sings? People who had lost all belief in the saints

had in those days the strongest faith in heaven and the stars. They

believed readily enough that though the spirit, coming from God, is

free, the vile physical body depends wholly on the stars—

Aux corps vous donnez vostre loy,

Comme un potier à son argile.[56]

These celestial torches govern the universe. In vain man struggles,

suffers, battles, strains all his powers; he is in the grip of a

mysterious destiny.

Ainsi vous plaist, estoilles!...

En vain l’homme de sa prière

Vous tourmente soir et matin;

Il est traîné par son destin,

Comme est un flot de la rivière.[57]

—_Ronsard._

Women, particularly sensitive to the mystery of things, could not close

their ears against such lofty scientific preoccupations. Renée of France

implores the aid of the stars. Margaret exclaims, “their effects are felt

in human bodies.” Yet the surrender was not complete, as one might be

disposed to expect: it is a very remarkable fact that in spite of their

natural impressibility and their genius for imaginative flights, they did

not readily ascribe to medicine so supernal a glory. To them medicine was

a science of the earth earthy, a practical and experimental science. The

only metaphysical principle they associated with it came from without;

and that was, charity.

On the other hand they were wonderfully credulous.[58] One of their

passions was to collect strange exotic recipes of any and every kind.

Catherine Sforza, statesman as she was, spent hours in a private

laboratory, receiving a Jewess who had brought her a universal salve, or

verifying formulae for a celestial water, a cerebrine made of the marrow

of an ass, a magnet intended to compose family squabbles, and a thousand

other prescriptions of like virtue. One of her ambassadors sends her

a drug chiefly compounded of eggs and saffron, of which he sings the

virtues with a frenzy of enthusiasm: “I wish to be present when you test

it.... I would not change places with the King of France, so happy am I

in contemplating so admirable a thing; and besides, your Excellency would

not find another man like me: for courage is required, not to be afraid

of spirits; faith, to believe; secrecy, to betray nothing; and, finally,

you need the instruments that I have; the Universities of Bologna,

Ferrara, Paris, and Rome possess nothing like them.” At the very moment

of going to war Catherine does not forget to write an order for the jars

she needs for her experiments. Nevertheless, in all these strings of

formulae, often so puerile and collected for collecting’s sake, we detect

more than a collector’s mania: we cannot but see in them the thirst for

the unknown—an attempt to pierce the impenetrable beyond. This effort, it

may be admitted, was not very scientific. But was that of the most highly

accredited physician any more so? Women accepted the doctrine that the

sun governed the heart and nerves, Jupiter the liver, and Venus the rest

of the organism; but they were superior to it in so far as they drew no

conclusion from it, making hygiene their chief aim, and limiting their

ambition to the preservation of health and youthfulness.

In this respect they were successful; women have rarely been known

to retain their beauty in so much freshness up to an advanced age as

these women of the first years of the sixteenth century. Their activity

was unceasing, they drank deep of life, but never to excess: therein

lay their great secret—a secret that was simplicity itself, and of

inestimable value, as the next generation was to find when, by dint of

defying nature, by crushing themselves under busks and baubles, exposing

the bosom, turning night into day, or carrying everything to extremes,

the world became peopled with pale-faced, forbidding, white-lipped

women. Ere long a cruel procession of maladies appeared—nervous attacks,

fits of hysteria, stabbing pains at the heart, agonising births of puny

creatures—signalising the return of neurasthenia, which had seemed

buried, but which was to revive in triumph, and for which no other

remedies were to be found than a return to the life of nature, fresh

air, repose, renunciation of the habits of the fashionable world,

uninterrupted vegetation.

In brief, the woman whom marriage has started upon a physiological career

is bent on defending her body and remaining her own mistress, in face of

her husband, her physician—the whole world.

She has her work cut out for her. Further, she is beset under various

forms by an irruption of materialities, which would speedily overwhelm

her if she did not know how to cope with them. She has still to govern

the household, to regulate day by day its eating, drinking, sleeping—the

whole domestic organisation.

Husbands are all alike; it is in great measure to secure a house which

“goes like clockwork,” that they marry. They consider it the most natural

thing in the world for a woman to consecrate herself to rounding off

their life, to yoke herself in unmurmuring submission to thankless tasks,

like the domestic drudge described by Solomon, necessary to the world as

food or light: “She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her

hands.... She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her

household and a portion to her maidens.... She girdeth her loins with

strength.... Strength and honour are her clothing.... Favour is deceitful

and beauty is vain, but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be

praised.”

The preachers take pains to show that she shall indeed be praised, that

her ideal is glorious though her lot will be obscure, and that there is a

happiness in housewifely duty—in feeling that the whole household moves

by her impulse alone. “The wise woman has exalted her house”; on her

wisdom and rectitude has depended the greatness or the decay of a family.

To pull down is the work of fools. The wise build up, and is not to build

up a splendid mission, say the preachers with growing ardour—to build up

happiness for those one loves, and one’s own happiness in this world and

the world to come? “Favour is deceitful and beauty is vain!” Look at this

massive woman, probably happy in her own way, a marvel of plumpness, with

firm-set lips and a look of energy and masterfulness, unpoetic but very

wholesome—this matron of Lotto, blind to all indications that ironical

moonbeams are grimacing behind her; or this superb large-limbed creature,

burdened with a cluster of children, whom Holbein presents to us as

his wife. These good ladies, we may be sure, rise at six and retire at

ten, and from dawn till dark their only aim in life is to take the air,

to go to church, to cook and dust and darn. No Utopia worries them, no

philosophic idea ruffles the calm monotony of their lot.

The majority of French women were sprung from this type in its most

pronounced form, the rural form, and it was practically impossible for

them to alter. In France men of rank almost all belonged to the class of

landed proprietors, and the affairs of these proprietors had been for

several years passing through a crisis. Even if their income were below

the moderate figure of three or four thousand livres,[59] they had to

submit to being eaten out of house and home by a number of traditional

functionaries, while on the other hand the growing needs of luxury and

the depreciation of money seriously embarrassed them. More than one

noble, believing he saw a mine of gold opening in Italy, had joyously

buckled on his sword again, only to return impoverished, if not in debt,

worn out, and soured in temper.

The country squire bore his straitened circumstances with rather an ill

grace. Rubbing shoulders with the peasants (and the humblest peasant was

a lord in his own eyes) and with the village authorities; a determined

foe to Jews, financiers, and monopolists; a democrat, persuaded that all

men are equal, or nearly so; resigned moreover to figure as head of his

village, since a head it was bound to have, but troubling himself very

little about the other social magnates; he shut himself up in his estates

like his father and grandfather before him, among the sons and grandsons

of the people by whom those respectable personages had been surrounded.

He was an excellent man, of bluff manners and healthy appetite,

determined to keep his eldest son waiting for his inheritance as long

as possible, and to disperse the rest of his family, sending the boys

into the Church or the army, and marrying the girls to his neighbours.

He had a grudge against Louis XII. for giving the landed interest

nothing but fair words: Francis I., who multiplied court appointments

and paid handsome salaries, appeared to him the right sort of king for

agriculturists.

That was the kind of man with whom and for whom the majority of the

women of French society lived. At bottom, this husband is an idealist;

he despises money, and plumes himself on the fact with a certain smug

satisfaction; but in his home life he frequently acts as an absolute

realist, a cold-blooded calculator. He will readily and with the utmost

chivalrousness admit that women in general are superior beings, worthy

of much liberty; but he insists on his particular woman remaining on a

lower plane and occupying herself with practical matters. He relinquishes

to her the honour of keeping the accounts, he even authorises her to

negotiate a bargain, or to secure payment of a due, while he himself

hunts, settles disputes among his peasants, potters about, or does

nothing. Montaigne is eager to avow that he has no concern with business;

in his view it is ridiculous and unjust “that the idleness of our

wives should be fostered with our sweat and maintained by our toil.”

He admits in the most liberal manner the right of women to work, and

does so from pure goodness of heart, since women delight in managing,

and a woman who works wants no pity! While Madame de Montaigne is

keeping his accounts, planting, reaping, looking after the masons, her

intellectual husband is good-naturedly gossiping about mankind at large,

or tranquilly contemplating the backs of his books, or dawdling through

Italy, on the principle that travel is the salt of wedlock, poking his

nose into everything on the way, halting at the watering-places, visiting

interesting young ladies; all the time reverencing his wife, oh, so

deeply! He feels that when he returns and finds her among the haymakers,

his love will take a new lease of life: “These interruptions fill me with

a new kind of affection towards mine own people, and make my house so

much pleasanter a place.... I am not ignorant that true amity hath arms

long enough to embrace, to clasp and hold from one corner of the world

unto another.... The Stoics say that there is so great an affinity and

mutual relation between wise men that he who dineth in France feedeth his

companion in Egypt.... If I be at Rome ... I hold, I survey and govern my

house ... I even see my walls, my trees and my rents to grow.”[60]

In those days the direction of a household was an admirable

apprenticeship to philosophy, since it was a point of honour to maintain

a great number of idle people. Thus Madame de la Trémoille had to rule,

feed, and place forty men, four of whom were attached to her personal

service (chaplain, tailor, groom, and steward), and only three women, of

whom one was a nurse.

She had to maintain this retinue and give it a stamp of high

respectability and discipline, which was all the more difficult because

the servants were people of some consequence, there for life, holding

places that had been hereditary for several generations; in other

words, the house belonged to them, in virtue of some indefinable family

collectivism.

Further, people had an ingrained propensity to regard generosity as the

special mark of an aristocrat; and as this virtue was expected to grow in

proportion to rank, it invariably had the drawback of straitening their

means. Out of an enormous total expenditure, Madame de la Trémoille had

at her disposal only two hundred livres for her personal use. A prince

was often worse off than those who lived on his bounty.

Further, this “generosity” did not manifest itself only in money: it

declared itself in affectionate and gracious actions, which after

all involved expense. Thus at Blois no domestic event took place in

the household without the cognizance of the Duchess of Orleans; she

interested herself in the weddings and gave each couple a present:

her children acted as sponsors; she even looked after her servants’

love-children; she watched over the aged; any of her servants or even

of their friends who were in trouble were sure of her sympathy; she

interceded with the king to obtain pardon for a criminal or the remission

of a tax: “You will do both great charity and alms,” she wrote to him,

“and to me a singular pleasure.” Here and there in her modest accounts

there is a little space vacant, importing a surrender of feudal dues to

distressed tenants, a remission of rent, a cancelling of debt.

In the account-books of the leading French families there always occurs

a very suggestive chapter, under the heading of alms. In vain does

the charitable spirit in its shrinking from ostentation draw a veil

over the few lines in which the facts are intentionally summarised.

You breathe in passing an aroma of sweetness, just as in going by

a dead wall you divine, from whiffs of their scent, the roses and

violets on the other side. It was the women’s duty to dispense the

alms, and in so doing they obtained, across the arid waste of material

preoccupations, grand outlooks towards the ideal. A lady of that period

was good from pure goodness of heart; she could let her charity shed

its radiance spontaneously, without effort. She lived in the very heart

of wretchedness: the filthy hovel, instead of shrinking from her sight

and entrenching itself in hateful and inaccessible suburbs, hung upon

the walls of the castle, like a parasitic plant. What woman could shut

her ears against the cries of wretchedness so near? And charity also

was recognised by the State. Louis XII. devoted to it a total of six

thousand livres, which he increased in 1509 by one thousand six hundred

and forty-two livres; and to ensure a more conscientious distribution

he even appointed, in addition to his confessor and almoner, a special

functionary, Jacques Acarie, who received the title of “treasurer of the

offerings, alms, and devotions.”

This fondness for almsgiving the king inherited from his mother, Mary of

Cleves, who was generosity itself. She did not confine herself to the

charitable doles that were traditional, or almost obligatory, such as the

offerings at Easter or All-Hallows: the present of a robe to the “King of

the château” on Twelfth Night; New-Year’s presents to a whole village of

improvised musicians who came deafening her with drums, clarions, carols,

and cries of “_Au guy l’an neuf!_”[61] She went farther afield, to seek

out the poor, and in secret she spent her pin-money in succouring them.

But these private resources were far from inexhaustible. Like many women,

she had a strong predilection for one special work of charity—the care

of women in child-bed. She organised for them a regular supply of food,

besides giving occasional assistance in money or in kind.

She took a personal interest also in the Hospital, and worked with her

own hands in a Dorcas society which she founded, and which distributed

every year in the little town of Blois five hundred shirts and five

hundred dresses.

In addition to all this there was a long list of “good works” in a

more special sense: little dowries of fifty or sixty sous bestowed on

poor girls, who sometimes bore notable names, like “Jeanne the Fair,”

“Lawrence and Jeanne de Saint-Prest”; pensions to needy students; alms

to convents; subscriptions to churches. The family of Joan of Arc had a

special right to the bounty of the faithful: “Perrette de Lys” used to

receive fifty sous “to bring up her own children.”

Truly charity flourished in France, becoming almost a new chivalry.

Certain men of the world became self-constituted alms-collectors for a

convent or nunnery, under the name of its “spiritual friends.”

It cannot be said that France owed anything in this regard to the

example of Italy. The Italians enjoyed large incomes, much larger than

the average Frenchman of ancient and sometimes crippled fortune; but

their expenses were heavier; they had to give fêtes and buy pictures and

villas. Without wishing to exaggerate the significance of an anecdote, it

is curious enough to compare with the excellent practices of the French

Court a characteristic action on the part of Julius II. In the course

of the expedition against Bologna, the Pope was told that one of the

old court servants had just lost his only mule. “What did it die of?”

was the Pope’s curt response. “Of the bad water of Perugia.” “Send the

stud-master to me.” Everyone believed that he was sent for to replace the

defunct mule, but Julius simply said: “Take care they drink nothing but

boiled water.”

Many great charitable schemes were in operation in Italy, where

refinement and compassion were highly developed; but the wealthy people

of Italy had no great love for anonymous almsgiving. This was due, no

doubt, to the fact that poverty bears itself more light-heartedly under

an azure sky. In France, where, unhappily, the stars could not fill

hungry mouths, the old traditions, in spite of the seductions of luxury,

were nobly preserved by the women. Anne of France and Anne of Brittany

both received the nickname of “Mother of Maidens,” in allusion to the

dowerless girls they befriended. Anne of France, who has sometimes been

taxed with avarice, contrived to dispense her benefactions quietly, as

cleverly as others trumpeted theirs. At her expense intelligent children

of the lower classes were kept at their studies until they had taken

their degree; orphans learnt needlework or some trade; widows, cripples,

beggars, poor folk too proud to beg, the broken-hearted, saw unexpected

manna fall from heaven; deserving people were encouraged, sustained,

uplifted, “cherished and nourished” by an unseen providence.[62]

How beautiful, how rare is the art of giving! In our day we see organised

innumerable charitable schemes, “collections” without number, harvests of

good works. But how many people give for love of giving?

Margaret of France, too, like a true princess, was generous, and loved to

do good by stealth. In her anxiety not to appear to curry favour with the

people, she refused—in the blunt phraseology of one of her biographers—to

act “like a mountebank capering on a platform.” “She was wont to say that

kings and princes are not masters and lords of the poor, but only their

ministers.”

The writer of a moral history must needs explore all these sweet recesses

of a woman’s soul, where so mysterious a work is accomplished. Later on

we shall see the women bustling about on the public stage, giving the

world what it demands of them. Here, in the silence of the heart, they

act only for themselves; yet, even from the social standpoint, they

will never do a loftier or more efficacious work. On the rugged path on

which so many of the unhappy are apt to lose their philosophy, is it not

well to spread a soft thick carpet, so that the wayfarers may step more

lightly and be less roughly jolted? This of itself is surely a genuine

work of love, in full accord with the words of Christ: “To her much shall

be forgiven, for she loved much!” From the very outset of their life,

painfully spelling out the meaning of wedlock, women are, almost unknown

to themselves, winging their flight towards the ideal, towards love.

Here, love calls itself charity, that is to say, love for the sick, love

for the poor, love for all who are weak and all who suffer.

CHAPTER III

THE CHILDREN

Their mission as mothers, thanks to the precautions of which we have

spoken, did not weigh very heavily upon the women. The tide was set

against large families; in the country, six children were thought an

enormous encumbrance, and as a rule the higher the rank the smaller

the family. There were not a few houses which had no children at all.

Somewhere in Lombardy, indeed, there was an old law granting exemption

from taxes to families of twelve children, but it did not result in an

embarrassed exchequer.

The physicians questioned on this phenomenon return only evasive

explanations. Placing themselves as they did at a special standpoint,

they held the women more especially responsible, accusing the detestable

experiments some of them indulged in with a view to preserving their

figure, such as drinking water or vinegar, eating sour foods, never

setting foot to ground; or a life at high pressure, well calculated to

develop morbid germs and increase nervous over-excitement; the sort of

St. Vitus’s dance which affects some people; and the thousand other

causes of moral and cerebral derangement. Evidently, in their view,

nothing would be so likely to facilitate motherhood as a life spent in

feeding the pigs and the poultry.

Yet women resign themselves better than men to the trials that a family

brings upon them.

When they first recognise their condition, even those who do not feel

called upon to make too much of their duty heroically accept their lot.

No one pities them; it is natural to them to love children,[63] and if

there are moments of anguish to fear, there are also blissful moments

to look forward to. The husband, on the other hand, is disconsolate; he

regrets everything; he sees in the cold light of reason the consequences

of the event, and his friends agree that he will reap nothing but

worries. A man of fashion collects pictures, antiques, not children.

Some charitable souls suggest that children assure a kind of survival,

are a pledge of immortality, a security for the continuance of the race;

but, for that matter, a much simpler, surer and more comfortable way of

achieving immortality is simply to write a sonnet. Hardly any but poor

drudges, “chestnut eaters,” can afford the luxury of being fruitful and

multiplying, because for them, in their kind of work, with their rigorous

enforcement of paternal authority, a swarm of children represents an

immediate increase of earning-power and tools at very little cost. A

middle-class householder, who loves his ease or is ambitious only to

swell his banking account, has nothing to gain by a large family.

Among the middle class, then, the budding father is the subject of

sincere commiseration. What cares, what vexations will be his! He regards

himself as bound for some time to consider the slightest whim of his wife

as sacred. With a flutter at the heart he hies him to the astrologer to

ascertain at least if it is a boy or a girl; and when the unfeeling stars

announce a girl, he still manages to smile.

One fine day (or fine night, for Nature is whimsical in her choice), see

him, lantern in hand, chilled to the marrow, shivering, running off to

find the nurse; and then what terrible, what wearing hours follow! In

very truth it is he who demands pity, for Providence, having failed to

foresee these moments for the man, has forgotten to give him strength

equal to them. How ardently he wishes it were all over! “There is no

saint in the calendar,” he cries, “but shall have his candle!” The first

wail of the newcomer pours balm on the mother’s heart; but what of the

husband? Can he spare time to admire this shapeless, unsightly little

creature? He seeks nurses for mother and child, he has the room hung with

red, covers the floor with velvet rugs; if by good luck he falls asleep

in a corner, it is only in his dreams to see a spectral balance-sheet

dancing a frantic saraband. No, he has not his wife’s strength.

The red room becomes for the young mother a palace of delight. It was

a charity to visit a relative, friend, or neighbour when recovery was

assured, and very few women would risk losing paradise for such a trifle.

And so the room is never empty. There the lady holds a “regal court,” or

what we, with less enthusiasm, should call a woman’s club. We may fancy

how they chatter, how often the husband is hauled over the coals, how

they cry shame on him. “What! this shabby dress! He wouldn’t give you

this or that? Ah, the old skinflint!”

There prevailed in Italy the very amiable practice of sending all sorts

of little presents—flowers, fruit, trinkets, nicknacks. The young mother

was entitled also to a little tray, painted or chased, of which charming

specimens exist, real works of art. All these presents came in a heap.

With his grave and masculine brush, Domenico Ghirlandajo has depicted for

us a scene at Santa-Maria-Novella: a maidservant is presenting a cordial

on the tray, a friend is amusing herself with the baby, a high-born dame

is making her entry in great dignity, a message-girl is bringing in a

superb basket of fruit. It is a constant stream of visitors, wonderfully

picturesque.

As to the husband, he has disappeared among his occupations and his

worries; he reappears a fortnight later, to return these civilities with

a grand dinner.

The child is to belong to the mother until the eighth year; an exquisite

period in which the heart will expand. It is as she clasps in her arms

this feeble little creature, this messenger from a new world, that a

woman comprehends love; life appears to her all bathed in a mysterious

light, golden, and warm, and glad. All women, whether cultivated or

illiterate, have this sensation.

For some time, perhaps for several years, a mother can thus find the

restfulness that springs from happiness, and, in making all things

minister to her inward joy, she steeps her soul in a felicity to which

she foresees no end.

No woman, then, ought to deprive herself of the first smiles of her

child, his first prattlings, his divine fondlings, which Raphael has

depicted and which Erasmus considered so beautiful a thing that he made

them a theme for rhetorical exercises.

But from the very first the world interposed with tyrannous hand. In old

times a woman had been permitted to nurse her child; suckling constituted

a part of the maternal functions, approved by moralists and physicians.

But now the fashion had changed; the cry of milk-sellers offering milk

for the nursery was added to the morning din in the streets of Paris. The

smaller gentry and even a certain number of country magnates[64] sent

their children out to nurse; and to meet this need, human cattle-rearing

became a recognised agricultural industry, which flourished exceedingly,

though it was rather speculative for those engaged in it, for the

children were sometimes left in settlement of the bill.

In the great houses, or those of middle station, a nurse was employed,

after satisfying moral and medical tests—a stout respectable person

from twenty to thirty years of age. She entered the family, and there

represented the life of nature, occupying, to the end of her days if she

pleased, a privileged situation about her foster-child.

Not infrequently, we must admit, the husband was heartily at one with the

ancient principles, and would very readily have authorised his wife to

dispense with a nurse. But then some fair friend would take him aside and

put him to shame: “What, he actually means to impose that bondage upon

his wife! Does he not see already how worn out she is! Ah, he means to

compel her to it, and we very well know why, the miser! Really, who would

have thought a husband had a soul black enough to inflict such thraldom

on a woman, who, thank God, still possesses some attractions!”

And in that last word there is a world of meaning. A wife of fifteen or

sixteen years, after a year or two of marriage, had every reason to think

that life was not over for her, and that she still had need of her beauty.

Further, etiquette, and in princely houses even politics, intervened:

the convenances were opposed to a mother taking too personal a part in

her children’s upbringing, for in that case it would not have been worth

while to own a whole regiment of servants. There they were, however, and

their allotted functions must be respected; and so the mother had to

limit her solicitude to a careful superintendence.

Nevertheless, many women ventured to set etiquette at defiance. The

Princess of Orange appears just like any other woman when she writes so

joyfully to her sister-in-law, Anne of France, that she has just seen her

“fair niece,” who called her “mummy and daddy,” and “gave her as sweet a

welcome in her little baby-talk as such a baby could.” So, too, Louise

of Savoy, when, in 1520, in the midst of preoccupations of every kind,

she recalls that, thirty-five years before, Francis I. had cut his first

teeth quite unnoticed, “and was not the least little bit ill.”

Up to the age of seven, the children remained under their mother’s

fostering wing, in a pure state of vegetation. Moralists and physicians

taught that they must be allowed to develop freely, without having to

learn anything, and without bothering about anything but good air and a

regular life.

The grand principle of education is to let children grow up of

themselves, alone, unaided, without grand theories, without dogmatism;

and to habituate them to rely on nothing—neither neither fear nor love;

to be themselves; and this from the very earliest infancy. Every being

entering life brings to it his own individuality for development; he has

the free use of his faculties; he observes much, instinctively using eyes

and ears, and his soul reflects his environment like a celestial mirror.

So the mother has only to help him, direct him, set him good examples.

This careful attention in early days appears of capital importance,

because then or never is the time to root up any little weeds one by one

as they appear. No strenuous effort is needed; it is work to be done by a

woman’s hand, gently.

Hitherto it had been imagined that the first thing needful was to secure

a maximum of physical strength, and consequently to harden a child by

means almost cruel, such as an exemplary self-repression, a life in the

open air, freely exposed to all inclemencies of the weather. If a child

wept he was allowed to weep. He was taken sometimes to church, or to see

very near relatives, but never to places of amusement, to the theatre,

or to the houses of the wealthy. To become ever so little accustomed to

comfort, idleness, or an artificial life was considered fatal. People

feared to make a mollycoddle of him, and said to themselves that the army

and the gymnasium in later years would never eradicate ill habits formed

in childhood. They thought only of the children; the mothers were left

out of account.

The women regarded this system as much too severe, and one of the first

results of their influence was its modification. Why martyr the children

under pretext of hardening them? What was the good of exposing them

half naked to the cold, or of making little monks of them, and assuming

towards them the airs of a policeman? Was it so great a crime to show

these poor little creatures some affection, to admit them to some share

with their elders in the life they were bound to know, to form their

minds and their manners by allowing them a place at the card table, or to

give them companions—even at the cost of a black eye?

The old moralists regarded such proceedings as premature and far too

unsystematic, and refused to hear of anything but muscle, maintaining

that entrance into the world always came soon enough. Women were to

divert education into another channel. When they come to gain greater

power in the home, we shall find them demanding the right to love their

children, enter into their concerns, live with them, take pleasure in

them, at least until they attain the classic age of seven.

THE BOYS.

When the seven years were past, a boy became for his mother only an

object of anxiety or tribulation. He came under the direct and exclusive

authority of his father, who aimed at moulding him on large lines and

turning him at fourteen, not into a bookish don, nor perhaps a mere

‘pass-man’ even, but into a man of backbone and individuality, armed at

all points for the battle of life. Our ancestors had a particular horror

of everything resembling enlistment into brigades, reduction to a uniform

pattern. The collegiate system seemed to them detestable, a make-shift

in the worst sense; Louis XI., though he took care to send the princes

of the younger branch to college, just as carefully avoided sending his

son there. College, as Montaigne said, was a “factory of Latinizers,” a

“house of preventive correction,” where men worked like day-labourers

(of that period) fourteen or fifteen hours a day, until their brains

were completely addled and they hated the sight of books; and what, if

you please, was the magnificent result? A smattering of Greek and Latin,

a certain facility in prating about Jupiter, Venus, Pyramus—without too

minute an enquiry, happily, into what those august names stood for. As to

ideas, they did no more than stuff the boys with a few stock notions to

serve for intelligence,[65] instead of vigorously developing the creative

and original faculties.

Thus there was general agreement that college was to be avoided as

much as possible, and that a boy should remain at home. But then came

the tug-of-war. If he remained at home, the mother, who had in all

probability centred precisely on this son all her affection, would

claim him as her care, which is just what the father did not wish; he

mistrusted her, her kindness, her “shows of love.” It was an axiom that

boys must be subjected to thoroughly masculine management, a life of

birching, under the firm hand of the father; the father had a perfect

right to forbid them to see their mother. How could he succeed in

“hardening the soul and the muscles” of a boy, in giving him a physical

and moral robustness depending largely on the “thickness of the skin,”

if the mother was always at hand, interfering, discovering that her son

had been too hot or too cold, petting him, commiserating his slightest

hardships? That was not the way to make a man!

Nowhere was the battle against feminism fought more resolutely than on

this ground. The adversaries of women may be almost infallibly recognised

by this mark, that they insist above all things on keeping in their hands

the education of men, because they regard this as the direction in which

the influence of women is most manifestly fatal.

They fear family life because of the freedom which reigns there, and

because they know nothing worse for a man than a precocious impulse

towards sensibility. “When I was twenty,” growls an old man, “I knew

nothing about women; in these days, infants in arms are further

advanced.” That is a proof, someone will say, of superior intelligence,

a guarantee of their virtue. Not at all. Any system, even college,

was preferred to the education of men by women. From the moment when

tenderness and sympathy become paramount in a house, there is no course

open but to get rid of the boys at any cost.

But is not this to push rigour a little too far, and uselessly to

lacerate the mother’s heart, this aching heart which thought it had at

last found something to fill its void? The mothers are not lacking in

arguments to support their claims. They refuse absolutely to acknowledge

that kindness necessarily spells weakness. Has it not been understood

from time immemorial, by people who could least be suspected of

sentimentalism, how important it is to preserve for a man his refuge in

the affection of his mother? Have not the names of Saint Monica and so

many other devoted mothers always been cited with delight? A rational

education ought not to rely solely on the principle of fear: it should

be the express image of life; and if brutality and coarseness are to

be banished from the world, it will not do to begin by sowing them

broadcast. How many men, nobly fashioned by the hands of women, have

been brought, by means of love’s training alone, to a perfect perception

of authority, reverence, discipline! Affection has a wisdom of its own,

secret agencies of its own; a mother’s heart can see as clearly, and

obtain as many practical results, as the reason and the despotism of

the father. In this, as in other things, force is not everything, and

another regimen is possible than that of the “birch,” or indeed of the

“filliping,” dear to Montaigne.

Margaret of France offers us on this subject a pertinent object-lesson;

she cites herself. Her mother, Louise of Savoy, left a widow, indulged to

the utmost the luxury of freely loving her children. When someone spoke

to her of handing her son over to men, she made answer by installing the

bed of the young Francis in her own room. And the result?

Fille et filz eut, à elle obéyssans,

Rempliz d’esprit, de vertuz et bon sens.[66]

We can understand what deep chords were struck by this dispute between

the fathers and the mothers, and what echoes it set sounding in the

whole life of the women. Separated as they were from their sons by force

of custom, it was natural indeed that, eager to imbue the stern spirit of

men with love and tenderness, they should turn passionately to the love

of their children.

In the first engagement they were often worsted. The son went off

to college. Montaigne deplores it. It is within the four walls of a

class-room, he says, and by doses of Greek syntax, that a young fellow is

to be taught the science of life and given that clear philosophic outlook

which comes through history and experience! What professor will teach

him the wisdom of holding aloof from the world’s Vanity Fair, swarming

with upstart mountebanks and overweening buffoons? His mother would have

liked to extract for him the essence of life, the secret of happiness, to

impart to him the sacred spark of love. But Montaigne is one of those who

regard this as very dangerous; he believes, in short, that “seeing the

world” would be still more fatal than “preventive imprisonment.”

In other cases, the father would select a tutor to train his son, and

then the crisis lay below the surface.

The father always has some hesitation in determining his course. To begin

with, he thinks of the expense, and though enthusiasts represent that

there is no better investment, he knits his brows. Then he would like

to find a perfect man: a difficult matter. As a rule, he decides on the

recommendation of friends, who have seen their nominee at work, and are

loud in praise of his tact, his manner, his method, his knowledge; they

do not explain that their man finds it necessary to expatriate himself,

but he is still young (thirty or thirty-five), and is anxious to make a

position.

The candidate himself takes up his pen to speak with becoming modesty

of his humble accomplishments. He promises to ride out with his pupil,

and “engage in any other exercise that may be desired”; all that he asks

is that he may sleep outside the château and not have to dine in the

kitchen, like some of his colleagues. This is not enough for the anxious

mother; she would like to know if he is a man of honour and a gentleman.

Her mind is set at rest.

For a long time these tutors maintained a certain attitude of reserve.

In his _Calandra_, Bibbiena gives an example of one who is completely

uninteresting, speaking, acting, and dressing like the rest of men. But

these young fellows were men, and what is more, men of education, not

so foolish as, after tasting of a life of refinement, to fail long to

recognise its advantages. Sometimes, under a guileless demeanour, they

suffered temptations the reverse of philosophic: Vegio[67] calls them,

without mincing matters, “abominable bucks.” They learnt by experience

how hard it is to get on by zeal and earnestness, and how easy by other

means. They cultivated literature to some purpose. No one thought any

the worse of Antony de la Salle, the austere tutor of the house of Anjou

in the 15th century, for writing _The Fifteen Joys of Marriage_ or _The

Hundred Novels_, or of Lemaire’s[68] notion of elevating the ideas of

the young Charles V. by offering him delicate nourishment in the shape

of a _Judgment of Paris_ of photographic realism—a picture of the future

reserved by heaven for princes and the great ones of the earth. Such

things were read: dissertations on Aristotle were not.

In proportion as the women posed as patrons of literature, the tutor type

appears in higher relief. The torrent of invective let loose against

them leaves no room for doubt that the tutors had red-letter days.

The dramatists and the writers of novels do not condone the airs of

proprietorship they assumed in regard to mothers or cousins. They show

you a poor devil of a pedagogue, a dried-up anatomy, void of personal

merit, ill-featured, grotesque, boorish, dying for love of some fair,

rich and distinguished girl, whom he pesters with glowing love-letters,

or with sonnets spiced with epicureanism. What peals of laughter there

are when he, like many others, comes in due course to taste the rod in

pickle!

From the moment when Aretino, in his _Marescalco_, which appeared in

1533, revealed the dramatic possibilities of such a part, the type was

fixed.

Before the tutor appears on the scene you know what you are going to

see: a spectacled pedant, ungainly, loutish, pretentious, a twaddling

bore, full of philology and quotations. His very features have acquired a

mechanical cast betraying his habit of holding forth on the obvious, as

Montaigne says, or of extinguishing youth by his stupidity, his “hoggish

wisdom,” to adopt the words of Rabelais.

Then, in virtue of a law of fate, the glory of the tutor waned and

fell. The impulse that went forth towards liberal studies brought so

many rivals into the field that, unless he opened a private seminary or

obtained a professorial chair, the tutor was ruined. His salary became

diminutive, and, as we know, the man who is poorly paid is thought little

of. He may take all the pains imaginable, set impositions, rap knuckles,

pull ears, but no one is satisfied.

“I know no worse blockhead in the world than the scholar, except it be

the pedant.”

And then the poor “pedant,” full of gall and bitterness, withdraws into

his shell. After a long day of toil and drudgery, his only pleasure in

life is to get back to his solitary room, and there spend the night in

collating notes, collecting rare phrases, happy turns of expression, or

hammering out verses, love poems addressed to a beauty whom luckily he

does not know, or lyrical verses at a white heat of passion. And these

productions of his heart (such of them, at least, as Fortune has deigned

to preserve) lie to this day, bundles of them, in the dust of archives.

Needless to add that the tutor considers himself martyred by the father.

The father, who does not profess to love him, treats him indeed, more or

less openly, as a tradesman and a nuisance, and interferes when the whim

takes him, finding fault with this and that—the boy’s talkativeness, his

pranks, his bad companions. He would like on the one hand less severity,

on the other more progress. And then this youngster, who calls him “Sir,”

and whom he always regards as a child, assumes mannish ways and threatens

to follow at his heels: another serious drain upon his purse! Besides,

what is the good of so many courses of study, of this “bookish swagger”?

Can’t he learn everything without such a fuss? What, here is a child we

are going to launch into actual life, and you stuff him with syllogisms,

dates, a world of mere lumber! Did Alexander the Great learn all these

things? He had, grant you, a tutor named Aristotle; ay, and with a few

good moral principles for his whole kit he conquered the world! True,

he respected the arts and sciences, he praised their “excellence and

elegance,” but was he ever seen to grow pale and bite his nails over a

problem in dialectics? No, indeed![69]

The tutors were never safe from these annoyances, except perhaps in the

houses of princes or kings, because then they were important personages,

high functionaries, and a numerous body.

The mother, on the contrary, made herself the friend of the tutor, and

by this means exercised a perceptible influence upon him. She surrounded

him with affectionate attentions. They were two natural allies, two

feeble and down-trodden creatures who sought support in high communings

which the husband did not understand. As a man of culture the tutor leant

towards feminism, and he tasted doubly, for himself and for his pupil,

the attentions, the solicitous benevolence, which a mother throws about

the work of education. The palace of Louise of Savoy at Amboise thus

saw a succession of special tutors who came to imbue Francis I. with

aesthetic principles, and they retained the pleasantest recollections of

their stay. The young princess indeed spoilt them, pampered them, almost;

she had them at her own table, instead of leaving them to the society of

chamberlains and playactors: she made them talk, and talked with them.

In spite of all opposition, the education of men thus underwent a

gradual transformation in cultivated countries. Instead of maintaining

their former attitude of grave reserve, hardly distinguishable from

bashfulness, and of regarding everybody, especially persons well on in

years, with a distant respect; instead, notably, of showing in their

intercourse with women all the shades of respect from profound reverence

to profound courtesy, the majority of these young men made their entrance

into life without embarrassment and with the most charming manners. They

put off the armour of social etiquette, they were docile, pleasant,

graceful in bearing, proficient in the art of pleasing. A multitude of

books on “civility,” an excellent specimen of which came from the pen

of Erasmus, instructed them in the science of good-breeding, formerly

somewhat neglected. Moreover, as education is always the great objective

of men who desire to exercise a serious influence on thought, they vied

with one another in propounding theories and advocating each his own

system in regard to the direction of youth, a task which engrossed such

men as Cordier,[70] Sadoleto,[71] Vivès,[72] Luther, Calvin, Erasmus,

to mention only the chief. We need not follow here their far-reaching

discussions, which are but the development of the struggle entered

upon between the idealistic and the matter-of-fact spirits. On the

extreme frontier of the two realms Zwingle, established so to speak as

a mainguard, defends the German tactics. Without denying the amenities

of aestheticism, he declares for an education of cloistral severity,

for curricula of the exact sciences and logic, and prefers Hebraists or

erudite Hellenists to elegant Latinists.

Erasmus, on the contrary, marks out the Roman frontier. He considers

that any effort to direct the intelligence of children into one rigid

channel only has the effect of drying it up. He appreciates neither the

exhibition of truth in its skeleton state, the system which flourished

in the schools of the Middle Ages, nor the pure apprenticeship to

utilitarianism to which Zwingle inclines. The sentiment of the beautiful,

in his view, offers an immense advantage in life—that of sustaining

and consoling the spirit; in education there is no other process for

widening, refining, elevating the faculties.[73] The new movement has his

entire approval.

Indeed, he is ready to go very far. Instead of banishing all thoughts

of women from their minds, he is surprisingly ready to explain to

young men that there are two loves, a good and a bad, and to set them

such subjects for composition as the question “ought a man to marry or

not?” Hütten[74] pokes great fun at the coy professors who so carefully

expurgate the mythology, who would fain drape the Muses and turn them

into angels, or who compare Diana to the Virgin Mother.

In reality, as everybody had his own programme of education, dependent

on no one’s theories or whims, all this fine ardour produced little but

modifications of detail. So men remained faithful to gymnastics and

all the sports—riding, hunting, fishing, tennis, perhaps even to sober

philosophic deambulations in the style of St. Gregory of Nazianzen. But

they held dancing in less abhorrence, and the love of gaming worked havoc.

Music triumphed over its detractors, who had been wont to represent it as

directly tending towards effeminacy and voluptuous impressibility. Now,

on the contrary, it was regarded as a child’s most ennobling avocation

and a precious resource for forming his mind. Instruction in the

principles of design seemed a necessity for men who were called to live

among objects of art, and who, without some practical experience, would

infallibly fall a prey to pinchbeck.

However, it is impossible to deny that a too exclusive development of

the emotional side of their nature did produce, among certain young

men, untoward and even disastrous results. Education had become very

wide-spread; everybody sought after it, rather out of _amour-propre_

than to supply needs they really felt; and the result was that there

was less anxiety to equip solidly a few choice minds than to give the

mass a superficial polish. The world was overrun with amiable young

men, patterns of social accomplishment, knowing how to bow, dancing

well, of excellent table manners, primed moreover with a few tags of

Latin or Greek, living in elegant idleness, and thus the pride of the

good merchant who had the honour of begetting them and keeping the pot

boiling. Their weak point was that they knew too much of life in their

beardless youth: aestheticism had brought them neither illusions nor

enthusiasm; but they were past-masters in the commercial valuation of

some fashionable young lady and her belongings.

At the age of fifteen or sixteen, all these young fellows, good or bad,

took flight in the most diverse directions, and escaped from their mother

for good and all.

She sees them go! Some, the smartest of them, go to Court as brilliant

pages, all ablaze with gold and velvet: the others into some château,

where they combine the duties of head-huntsman and stud-groom, and dine

in the kitchen, hoping to be mentioned in their master’s will.

Others, maintained by a more subtle father, are commissioned “to attain

unto the virtue and honour that knowledge gains for gentlemen.”[75]

Ah! the gay young sparks! They proceed, at great expense, to establish

themselves at Padua, Bologna, or elsewhere, and there the lore they

gather comes from profound study of Signora Angela’s ankles or Signora

Camilla’s bright eyes. One of these pious youths, the son of a councillor

of Paris, dismissed post-haste the private tutor accompanying him. So

long as the lad’s purse holds out, the father proves indulgent, and

indeed is secretly not a little proud of his heir’s escapades. Boys will

be boys. One facetious father addresses a letter to his son “studying at

Padua—or sent to study.”

Many people attributed the wildness of young men to the fact that their

education was not directed by women.

Calvin considers that the young men were thrown too much into women’s

society; Henri Estienne[76] charges upon aesthetic education all the

vices of the age. This is going a little too far: it would be just as

reasonable to make the vices of the age responsible for the bad results

of education. As a matter of fact, notwithstanding a certain measure

of progress, the education of the sixteenth century did commit errors

for which it had to pay. Discipline was relaxed.[77] It was a common

complaint that studies lost tone as they became more general;[78] the

new education took its pupils too young, forced them remorselessly

through too extensive curricula, encouraged them to be content with a

smattering, gave them the habit of not going deep into anything, and made

shallow and paradoxical men.

Two women who were the products of the most opposite principles, Louise

of Savoy and Anne of France, were on their guard against this error. The

one determined to have her son educated under her own eyes, the other

undertook the education of her future son-in-law—a clear proof that all

women cannot be charged with particular faults.

However paradoxical the idea may appear, it seems that the system of

education ought to have been more completely revolutionised. Either

the old principle of bringing boys up so as to make men of them should

have been maintained, or a new one should have been boldly and frankly

enunciated, namely, that it would be well for a boy to be brought up by

his mother, since he is to live with a woman, and a girl by her father,

since she is to live with a man. Of this principle, however, we nowhere

find the slightest hint.

In this education there would have been something more intimate, more

just, more natural, and perhaps more profitable. You can tell among a

thousand the men who have been brought up by a serious mother, and the

women brought up by a careful father.

Unhappily, the social customs of the time raised an insurmountable

obstacle. In addition to the fears of excessive sensibility of which we

have spoken, the rigid family principle ordained that the son should

belong to the family and not to his mother. He was a man: therefore

let him ride and hunt and be a soldier! It was better to err through

brutality than through tenderness.

In reality, many mothers exercised but an indirect and ineffective

influence on their sons. The sons were too much separated from them

and left them too soon. Were the mothers made for the children or the

children for the mothers? Judging from the number of households which

were only held together by the children, one might think they were made

for the mothers; and yet a woman who relied too much on this support was

sure to remain in cruel loneliness.

CHAPTER IV

THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS

If the sons were destined almost inevitably to disappoint their mothers’

hopes, the daughters were to compensate for that disappointment. We must

crave pardon for entering into all these details. It is impossible to

set forth the story of a woman’s heart without first of all plumbing as

deeply as possible the secret of those holy passions which move women as

mothers and as daughters. We started from the solid ground of marriage

after the old style, a mere physical and rational fact. The sensibility

of women begins to blossom out on coming into contact with physical

wretchedness; it creates the sick-nurse and the alms-distributor; it

is then that the mother is born. Her love for her sons has nothing but

separation to look forward to; but in the love of mother for daughter a

woman’s heart finds another stay. Here there is no interference to be

feared from a third party. The daughter belongs to the mother, and the

father does not even seek any share in their intimacy: “Women’s policy

hath a mystical proceeding; we must be content to leave it to them.”[79]

Let the father provide the girl’s dowry, that is all that is required of

him. In the formal and somewhat Philistine society which was the outcome

of the Middle Ages, the several shares of the parents were very clearly

defined.

But these things which the father knew nothing about are of the greatest

interest for us. We want to know what went on between mother and

daughter, and how the women of the future were being formed, for then

we shall know also whether the mother was able to fashion for herself

a lasting joy in her home, and whether she was so well satisfied with

the principles on which she herself had been brought up as to apply

them to her daughter. Later on we shall have to treat of more momentous

questions, of ideas much more highly artistic and philosophic, but we

shall meet with none from which a more thorough knowledge of the inner

workings of feminine souls is to be gained. In the slightest question of

education all the social questions have their echoes, as we hear the roar

of the ocean in a shell.

Historians are very far from agreement in the information they give us

as to the manner in which young girls were educated in those days. An

old, but false, proverb runs: “The mother feeds, the father instructs”;

which signifies in plain language that the mother never instructed,

suckling being the top of her capacity. On the other hand, as the

treatises on education speak only of the boys, or at most of “children,”

and practically never use the word “daughters,” some historians have

concluded that the girls were left to vegetate and that their education

was never considered, while others, on the contrary, and these not the

least important—such as Burckhardt and Minghetti—have believed that the

girls merely followed the same course as the boys.

We shall not traverse these two opinions, contradictory as they are,

because they both appear true to a certain extent.

The question of education really depends on another question, of much

greater moment, which we have set ourselves to answer in this book: What

ought women’s life to be? Where ought they to seek their happiness?

And at the outset we are brought face to face with a very troublesome

problem. Is a woman to continue to be married passively, as we have

seen her married—to be left almost a slave? or is she to be put into a

condition of self-defence? Is she to be made an obedient tool, a mirror

of the ideas of others, destitute of all mind of her own, and all the

happier in knowing nothing beyond the narrow bounds of her bedroom? or

does it seem better to render her an active, educated creature, with an

individuality of her own, capable of reasoning and acting? Is the mother

to remain merely a temporary guardian, charged with watching over a

little girl for a master of undisputed title, who will form her and train

her after his own fancy, and to whom she will belong at the earliest

moment, even in her first flower? or is the mother to be at perfect

liberty to link herself closely with her daughter, and, precisely because

the girl is one day to be given to another, to arm her with independence

and intelligence, even although she knows that sooner or later some

portion of this armour must be dropped on the way? There is the whole

question. And on that question depends the education of girls.

In the first case (that is if we adopt the time-honoured theory)

the mother was preparing a blank page. She had little to do except

to promote as hardy a vegetation as possible, a blossoming out into

strength and beauty, to maintain absolutely unbroken quietude, to

respect and even prolong the days of childhood.[80] There is no need

here for lengthy dissertations: the system consisted in proscribing

everything that involved the slightest mental exertion, even in the form

of little pastimes; in preserving an absolute simplicity, a cloistral

existence;[81] in shunning even physical exercises if they were at all

energetic. From the intellectual standpoint it allowed, on the artistic

side, some trifling pieces of needlework (tapestry, netting, or the

like); music, not suggestive or light, but classical music; as recreative

reading, some elementary books of religion or morality; in science, some

notions of physics, agriculture, medicine, some philosophical expositions

of great moral questions, such as original sin, the Redemption, the

immortality of the soul, and the Creed in general. That was what had gone

to form the little bride, the robust, sedate, matter-of-fact, shy little

creature whom at the beginning of this book we saw led to the altar. She

was ignorant, but so much the better: she was only being born into life,

but she brought as her stake a solid health and a well-balanced character

generally; and at thirteen years, that was a good deal. The husband would

do the rest.

And it must not be imagined that this system, barbarous as it may seem to

some, was regarded as at all ill-conceived. It had numerous friends. The

learned of the Middle Ages, from the venerable Egidio Colonna[82] to the

illustrious Gerson,[83] had formed no other idea of women’s needs. Gerson

even enunciated the aphorism (which, however, must not be pressed):

“All instruction for women should be looked at askance.” In this the

philosophers were at one with the physicians, whose advice was to err on

the side of caution. In support of their position, they invoked the great

name of St. Chrysostom,[84] and that of Lycurgus also, who wished to

prolong the childhood of young girls to the eighteenth year (and this in

Greece), and to devote the whole period to the care of the body.

On this system, the mothers could not form close ties with their

daughters, still less enter into their life. One mother, however,

inspired by her ardent devotion to an only daughter, and at the same

time thoroughly conversant with the actual necessities of life—Anne

of France—has shown to what good account these apparently rudimentary

opportunities might be turned, while paying due respect to the advice of

Gerson and the physicians. She set down her views in a little work, of

a purely practical and intimate character, designed for her daughter’s

use, and written day by day with a certain desultoriness, according to

the line her reflections or her reading happened to take, and without the

slightest intention of supporting a thesis. This book imparts to us _ex

abrupto_ the secret of her thoughts.

She pinned her faith to education, not to instruction; she desired an

education that was spontaneous and in some sort automatic, which would

result, not from a perfect intimacy between mother and daughter, still

less from a sentiment of equality, but solely from a kindly, frank, and

affectionate association, of such a nature that the mother would colour

her child’s character “as good wine colours its cask.”

This gentle prescription assumes a wide mental culture to begin with, and

a certain robustness of intelligence. Anne of France intended the moral

and philosophic education of the girl to be carried out with the aid of

Boethius, Plato, the fathers of the church, the ancient philosophers,

and, it need hardly be said, in conformity with the “Instructions of St.

Louis.”

On the other hand she did not trouble to develop the imagination or the

emotions: she had a horror of affectation, of all that appeared to her

to smack of the studied, the conventional, the theatrical: she would

not permit it anywhere, either in dress, in which she rejected false

simplicity and false elegance alike, or in conversation, studies, or

conduct. She loved only the splendour of truth, the glorification of the

real in its noble aspects. It was her aim to temper the young girl’s soul

by instilling into her the habit of searching enquiry and deep thought,

and of building her reasoning always on clear premises like the certainty

of death or the existence of God.

From these principles there resulted, not a critical scepticism like that

of Montaigne, Pascal, or Descartes, but, if one may say so, a vigorous

and affirmative scepticism, that is to say, the absolute, perhaps even

harsh determination to look the facts of life fairly in the face, as

serious but ephemeral matters; and to abstain from giving them colours,

shapes, an import which do not belong to them, from throwing a false halo

about them. As a drowning man clings to a rope, so Anne of France clung

to a precise and objective morality, which, firmly anchored on religious

faith, defied discouragements and fatigues as well as illusions. Beyond

the restless sea of mundane realities in all their nakedness, it pointed

to other realities, which appeared to her just as clear, just as

positive, and in which she found a steadfast beacon light.

In thus basing feminine education on individualism and a severe

conception of the True, Anne feared rather than desired the intrusion

of aestheticism. What was required, in her opinion, was to form strong

women, vigorous in body and mind: she wished to develop strength of

will and stability of character, which are practical virtues. Assuredly

she had no personal scorn for the beautiful: she gave proof enough to

the contrary. She loved an art full of sap and zest; she was a subtle

connoisseur, a royal patron! Delight in beautiful things was so natural

to her that she counted on transmitting the taste to her daughter.

And she was accomplished in philosophy; she read Plato, a first step

which some of the most confirmed lady platonists neglected. But she was

persuaded that the period of struggle was only opening for women, and

that they must arm themselves to maintain the fight. She had no bent

towards German utilitarianism—she could not have contented herself with

the studies Luther sanctioned, nor with the elementary programme of

virtue which Calvin found all-sufficient: at the same time, she had no

greater confidence in the idealism of Rome. The world was not yet perfect

enough! She joyfully hailed the dawn, but did not believe that the day

was yet fully come. Women must not be content with a dilettante reliance

on impressions; they must make what they love an object of thought, and

having formed their reasoned conception, must seek to realise it. For

them to be queens would be admirable indeed; but for the present it is

enough for them to escape crushing. What they need is will, and, as a

consequence, intellect and individuality.

This was a clear enough scheme of life. In Spain the same ideas obtained

so striking a success that people were not satisfied with the compromise

devised by Anne of France, and with this wholly moral education

which would leave the daughter for a few short years to her mother.

Circumstances were urgent; there was no time to waste; ideas were at

boiling-point: a part of the ancient principles, the physical and moral

repose recommended by the physicians, was sacrificed, and the children

were flung headlong into the whirlpool. Little girls sucked in Latin with

their mother’s milk; then, the soul being expropriated, so to speak, for

the public good, they were given a tutor at an age when they ought to

have been learning nothing but how to walk; at seven they were expected

to be able to maintain a conversation, and at thirteen to have finished

their studies and be ripe for matrimony.

This programme, so vigorous that at first blush one would be tempted to

think it a mere figment of the imagination, was not only propounded but

largely practised by one of the most conspicuous men of the time—Vivès,

the tutor of Isabella the Catholic’s daughters. Vivès went to England in

the train of Catherine of Aragon, and in that country of matter-of-fact

aspirations he could still have believed himself in Spain, so successful

was he in rousing the same fire and enthusiasm for his ideas. His fervour

led to a revolution, or rather, as Erasmus said with a smile, to a

“topsy-turvydom” in high society; the men, who continued to scour the

seas and do business in great waters, fell quite to the rear, while the

young ladies, stepping to the front, engaged with a brisk rivalry in

marvellous exhibitions of precocity. At thirteen, Lady Jane Grey read

Plato in the original, and Mary Stuart delivered in public her first

Latin speech; at fourteen, Queen Elizabeth translated a work by Margaret

of France, _The Mirror of the Sinful Soul_. These wonderfully clever

children were not confined to any particular country, and the same breeze

fanned the same flame from John o’ Groats to Gibraltar. Saint Theresa,

who was born in 1515, is an excellent type of her contemporaries. Bereft

of her mother, and one of a family of twelve, she was certainly not the

object of any special training, but kept pace with girls of her age; yet

at six years she was already, to use her own expression, “swept away by

a violent movement of love,” and had to be prevented from hurrying to

Africa in the hope of being massacred and winning heaven cheaply. What

singular girls!

The thing that urged them on was the general fear in which the husband

was held, the pressing need of attaining, ere it was too late, a good

condition of defence and even of superiority. The rising spectre of

marriage fascinated teacher and taught alike. At ten years of age, to

tell the truth, such personages as Anne of France and Margaret of France

had already disposed of their heart! so that to overwhelm them with

work was believed the best way to protect them against themselves. “The

craters of Etna, the forge of Vulcan, Vesuvius, Olympus cannot compare

their fires to those of the temperament of a young girl inflamed by high

feeding,” cries Vivès. The more effectually to extinguish these flames

Vivès reinforces the regimen of work with a course of cold water and a

vegetable diet, and this he austerely names “the perpetual fast” of the

Christian life; he proscribes dancing, and counts on serious studies to

preserve them from vanity and to widen the scope of their intellectual

activities. In short, while more sharply accentuating the scientific

note than Anne of France, he has the same end in view. Like her, he is

convinced, passionately convinced indeed, that it is right to set a

straight course for marriage, having now only a half-hearted belief in

the old ideal of virginity: he has, further, so rooted a horror of vain

sentimentalities, affectations, romances, poetry, all sensibility real

or affected, that he throws overboard Italian and French for his pupils:

he wishes them to have wills and energies of their own. But like a true

Spaniard, an enthusiast and yet a Stoic, he loves these warm, ardent

natures. He is a little like that lord-justice who in his official tone

interrupted a too pertinacious advocate, but under his breath bade him

continue. He shrinks from the flames, but sees in them the instrument of

regeneration. These little girls of thirteen, inured to the reading of

Scripture, tricked out with history and ethics, with Xenophon and Seneca,

he sends forth to the conquest of the world, to fulfil their vocation

as women. He hopes that their initiation into Biblical exegesis will

lead them to construct a philosophical religion for themselves, and that

they will attain a rational appreciation of Catholicism as the source of

justice and knowledge, and the sole panacea for society. That is the gist

of his preaching to the daughters of Isabella the Catholic. Did Luther

himself probe nearer the heart of the matter, or outline a scheme more

novel and more magnificent?

Let us complete our portrait of Vivès, and at the same time that of many

a young woman of the new generation, by adding that he by no means looked

down on the practical knowledge of plain cooking, of domestic economy

or the common medicines. It might be thought that he had no ardour but

for the Bible, and there is no lack of ill-natured jesters who cast a

stone at his Latinist ladies;[85] whereas, on the contrary, he spoke

up for the kitchen, though to the detriment of dress and dolls. “What,”

he cries, “is not a hand smutted with coal as good as a snow-white hand

that is open to everyone?” It only needs a father or mother to fall ill,

and he is perfectly happy, for then you will see his fair Latinist in

neat white apron, bringing a cooling draught she herself has mixed, and

bestowing one of those smiles for which one would gratefully gulp down a

whole druggist’s shop. Here, according to him, is the distinguishing mark

of his system; a practically useful intelligence, and a physical as well

as moral devotion.

The Italian school drew its inspiration much more directly from the

need of the ideal; it rejected passion as full of peril and made

mere sensibility its goal. But it too pretended to take its stand on

conceptions of absolute truth, though more elementary ones; and these

it did not represent as intellectual acquirements, because it regarded,

not knowledge, but feeling and judgment, as the end a woman ought to

set before her. The education dear to this school was above all an

education of impressions and enthusiasm, in which scientific truth only

came in to supply ballast and to prevent an exaggerated serenity, or

an over-confidence in life. In its refinement and elegance this school

preserved as it were an after perfume from the noble city of Rome, where

fastidious and ceremonious prelates, gourmets but not cooks, let money

flow into their pockets through immense spiritual aqueducts, and set

about pouring it away again in perfect cascades of ostentation. Hands

smutty with coal indeed! A lazzarone would blush at the thought! There

are none but princesses in Italy.

Dolce, a supreme example of the Italian, took, for the formation of an

Italian woman, the recognised elements: chastity, modesty, reserve,

composure, and a regular study (this was to be particularly free, with

no expurgation) of the classics and the church fathers;[86] and from all

this he would fashion for you the sweetest creature imaginable.

Idleness and melancholy were his two great foes: he had no hostility

to love. What reason was there to abstain from carefully cultivating a

young girl’s capacity for loving, seeing that as a woman she would find

in it her chief resource? To reject the thought of love, to avoid the

very utterance of the word, and then, like Vivès, to rack your brains

to create infinite derivatives, was, according to Dolce, a childish and

an untrustworthy proceeding; it would be much better to face the ordeal

frankly, and deaden its shocks beforehand by anointing oneself with the

healing balm of platonic doctrine, by exhibiting, on the one hand, the

body in its wretchedness, the vileness of earthly love, and on the other

the beauty of love divine and pure. Women may fall through passion,

but they can win salvation through sensibility, and therefore Dolce

nourished them on the appropriate classics: Virgil, parts of Horace,

Dante, Petrarch, Bembo, Sannazaro,[87] and, more especially, Castiglione.

To his opponents, however, this system seemed over-venturesome; they

reproached him with going half-way to meet danger, with putting into

hands still weak the two-edged sword which so often wounds lustier hands.

To this objection Dolce returned on behalf of the beautiful the same

answer that Vivès made on behalf of the true. He was convinced that a

liberal education was most surely calculated to form strong souls, citing

in support of his contention Corinna and a thousand other old-world

heroines rendered impeccable by culture, and, of his own time, the four

daughters of queen Isabel, pupils of Vivès; all four, indeed, equally

accomplished and yet equally unfortunate—but could anyone begrudge them

their misfortunes?

Thus, according to Dolce, abstract or severe studies were not for girls:

“vain and futile quackeries” he called them, which could only bring

them in subjection to men. “All that is needed is to awaken and foster

the faculties which are in women.” To rule as with a rod of iron, women

need only remain as they are, with the talents given them by nature.[88]

What is the good of teaching them, for example, the dates and the nice

problems of history? They should be taught to read history, to derive

from the accurate narrative of facts an impression of the poignant

emotions and moral struggles which the historian necessarily indicates

with a more or less light touch, and then, linking these events together

in their minds, to get at the heart of them, deduce the lofty moral

principles controlling them. In philosophy they have no need of great

metaphysical principles; but what is important for them is to understand

that misery exists, that there is suffering everywhere, often hidden away

and yet only too real. Woman is a fellow-worker with God! It suffices to

lop off the thorns which cumber her; she will shoot up naturally towards

the light, sucking, like a flower, the earth’s sap, which is love. The

corn which is to go to the mill and make bread needs the plough’s rude

toil, a lovely delicate flower often asks no more than a handful of earth

and a bountiful sky.

And it was in this way that so many sweet Italian women blossomed

out, almost spontaneously, delighting in life, themselves the joy and

felicity of the world, all compact of poetry, archaeology, rhetoric, and

philosophy—Attic through and through at thirteen years. The efflorescence

was universal save at Venice, a country half-Germanic, half-Oriental,

where they insisted on keeping the girls immured until their wedding-day,

showing nothing of them but bundles of millinery on Sundays. And yet

there do not appear to have been more angels at Venice than elsewhere,

and no one succeeded there in resuscitating the type (henceforth unknown)

of matrons hypnotised, as it were, by their husbands’ frown or the idea

of death. Italy was peopled with fairy-like creatures, who thought nobly

of all men and wore to admiration the double ornament of fine jewels and

a fine intellect. “A little girl,” said Bembo, “ought to learn Latin: it

puts the finishing touch to her charms.”

Louise of Savoy brought up her daughter Margaret according to these

Italian principles at a period when France as yet did not understand

them. Margaret blossomed like a flower: she knew something of everything

(too much indeed), notably of philosophy and theology: she learnt Latin,

Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish; but she could speak nothing but French.

At nine years of age, she was wonderfully clever and accomplished; at

thirteen, she inspired so much admiration as to be considered “rather

Persian than French.”

The defects of the system were not at once perceived, though these were

developing in women a thirst like that of Tantalus, exciting a state of

restless agitation and nervousness, which the old doctors of Gerson’s

school professed to guard against and which Vivès fancied he had avoided

by directing their activity towards a definite end. People were struck

only with the immediate advantages. Erasmus uttered heart-rending plaints

about the little girls he was ever meeting in the Low Countries, poor

ignorant little creatures, thick-lipped, podgy, stuck on high heels so as

to appear grown-up, over-dressed, rigged out with a load of ribbons and

feathers, with all the airs of innocent little baggages: “I ask myself,”

he cries, “if these are dolls, or monkeys, or girls.” How he would have

liked to tear off all that flummery, and fill their beaks with a little

Greek or French, or even a little Latin!

A simple fellow said to Margaret: “Men and women have different

functions, but their virtues ought to be equal.” He was making a mistake;

the virtues of women ought to be superior.

But if women believe that it is their mission to rule instead of to obey,

or, at any rate, that the obedience they owe has well-defined limits;

if they are no longer the burden which a father used to get rid of as

soon as possible, and which a husband received as his absolute property,

body and soul; if they desire to count for something; if marriage is

regarded as the union of two persons equally free, as the close and not

the commencement of education; if the wife is no longer the pupil of

her husband, and it is considered better for her to come to him fully

instructed: then a very natural consequence will inevitably ensue,

whatever may be thought or said: women will marry later, will insist on

exercising a choice as men do, and on laying down their own conditions:

they will in this way imagine that they have greater freedom and are

probably making a better bargain, for they have become women of sense.

The fortunate discovery was made that Lycurgus, in the main, considered

twenty years the best age for marriage: with the result that in the most

aristocratic families, and those most swayed by tradition, they waited

with the most perfect resignation until the seventeenth year,[89] while

ladies of exceptional courage held that it was “modern style” to marry

much later. Margaret of France was not married till she was thirty-seven.

This reform, important as it was, did not end in making what we should

regard as a happy girlhood possible.

However the Italian theory might wreathe life with roses and preserve a

happy ignorance of physiological problems, it was not easy for a French

girl to reach that point and retain this beautiful innocence, surrounded

as she was by people who called a spade a spade, idealising things no

more than in the days when she was married as soon as born.

Girlhood was not a delightful fiction which permits infinite hopes to be

cherished, and keeps realities hidden; it was rather an apprenticeship;

and after all, since the wife has a personal mission to accomplish in

the world, which will consist, so to speak, in patching and renovating

hearts that are rent, this apprenticeship seems as necessary to her as to

a laundress or a dressmaker.

The art cannot be learnt more successfully than in maidenhood.

From the moment this was admitted, it is correct to say, girls received

the same education as men: with this qualification, that their education

was more thorough, because they made a later beginning in life.

In the first place, they had male teachers, or even a tutor. Margaret of

France, like her brother, was taught only by tutors—a singular anomaly

at a time when women plumed themselves on their superiority, and one

which we shall not seek to explain. Humanists with the highest admiration

for woman’s intellect held governesses in horror,[90] and allowed no

discussion about the monopoly of instruction; even in Spain, the country

of learned women, Vivès insisted on instruction by men.

And yet the market was not overstocked with women’s tutors; the part

usually fell to more or less second-rate persons, who accepted it

light-heartedly enough; even in princely houses there was considerable

difficulty in keeping a man of real earnestness.

These young fellows readily transformed themselves into friends and

comrades: Brantôme accuses them of a thousand irregularities, and goes

so far as to match them with the physicians and apothecaries. Some of

them were known, it appears, to elope with their pupils, but that we must

believe to have been purely casual, and their gaiety to have taken, as

a rule, a more delicate form. Eustorg de Beaulieu[91] smilingly reminds

one of his pupils, now a staid wife and mother at Tulle, of the time when

she raved about her lessons, and said she would rather go to the clavecin

than to confession. Another pupil of his, the young Helen Gondy of Lyons,

called him in fun “her Hector,” a title which he accepted on the distinct

understanding that he was not stupidly to die for her, “like the other

Hector.” A third, Mademoiselle de Tournon, conceived the idea of making

a bishop of this excellent, jovial, amiable professor; but this time

Eustorg raised objections, and declared flatly that he was sure his skull

was too thick.

And so Dolce’s advice was followed; melancholy was banished. But I

am not sure that very fine distinctions were drawn between the two

kinds of love, or that the young masters possessed the delightful art

of developing only the fancy and the softer qualities. In France and

elsewhere, to all appearance, they rather treated their fair pupils in

masculine fashion, with a fearless handling of ideas; that at least is

the impression we get from Erasmus’ dialogues, _The Girl and the Lover_,

_The Youth and the Courtesan_. Brantôme taunts them with a certain

tendency to make special use of the risky passages in the Bible and their

authors for teaching theology and an elegant style.

In this way the young girls attained a perfect independence of mind. They

cannot even be compared with the American girl of to-day, for the old

hardy, somewhat wild French stock had undergone a wonderful grafting with

Italian refinement. Many of them, having reached a certain age, pursued

their studies with marvellous gusto; Petrarch and Erasmus they thought

rather poor stuff, preferring to work at Poggio[92] and Boccaccio. Their

style of talk was intrepid! Ah! there was no standing on ceremony with

them! Fun was fast and furious.

They devoured romances, novels and plays: these fine intrigues, these

riotous passions seemed to them to constitute the ideal life. They were

_demi-vierges_. “With all these lascivious romances, spotless virginity

will be unknown.”

To describe the indignation and grief of old-fashioned people at this

sight is impossible. “I would rather see a girl deaf or blind,” cries

Vivès, “than thus overstimulated to pleasure.” Of course it was pleaded

that the artistic instincts were being satisfied! But all these romances

bore but little likeness to the subtle analyses of our days, which are

sometimes masterpieces of philosophy: they were a tissue of adventures

all equally untrue to life. Vivès did not understand how, if only from

the point of view of taste, girls of any intelligence could go into

raptures over such extravagances: a knight who is left for dead, but

comes to life on the next page; a hero who massacres a hundred foes

single-handed; nor how they could worship as a demi-god the author of

such trash. He begs the mothers for pity’s sake to interfere, to take the

trouble to glance through a book before leaving it to their girls; but

the mothers are accustomed to live their own life, and besides, a lady

of fashion has so many occupations! He beseeches the preachers for help,

waxing almost indignant when he hears them pompously stringing together

their platitudes on dogma instead of boldly attacking questions of living

interest and condemning books that are absurd or of evil tendency. But

the preachers go on preaching.

Anne of France took a more dispassionate view: she saw clearly enough

that girls ought sometimes to put aside the church fathers, if only for

the pleasure of going back to them, and she did not despair of finding a

practical solution of the difficulty. Her dream was a very simple one—the

dream that recurs again and again and yet remains but a dream: namely,

to have good romances for young girls, pure, high-toned stories, replete

with the practical philosophy of life, and at the same time interesting,

dramatic, thrilling. She has left us a specimen, somewhat archaic

indeed, of what she desired: a historical romance founded on a passage

in Froissart about an unfortunate captain of Brest, one M. du Chatel,

whose son is, with flagrant bad faith, threatened with death by the

English if he does not betray the town into their hands. This eminently

patriotic subject is the groundwork of a little story, short, simple,

illustrated with a fair number of pictures, and in every way innocuous.

In the opening scene, Madame du Chatel swoons; further on, however,

it is she who, like a true woman, has all the strength of character,

and cheers her trembling husband with words worthy of a Roman matron,

or with magnificent appeals to the divine mercy, “although,” as she

says, “children are in a special sense the sons and daughters of their

mothers.” (How touching is this claim, interpolated quite incidentally!)

So the story proceeds with alternations of strength and weakness. On

coming to after a long swoon, the poor mother learns that her son is

dead. “God’s will be done!” she says, without a tear; “may our Lord

receive his soul!” And then she goes and dons her mourning, and, as soon

as she is alone, weeps!

And here, so please you, you have a story for young girls!

Unluckily, for a girl of eighteen or twenty life is no longer “such stuff

as dreams are made on,” and as a rule the romances, good or bad, are at

last thrown into the shade by a certain practical romance in which she

must needs play her part, and which demands her whole attention.

Not, assuredly, that all this led the young ladies to gild the pill or

modify their first conception of marriage; on the contrary, the more they

considered the matter, the more they weighed, in as just a balance as

men, the advantages against the disadvantages. Very often, princesses of

the blood royal loved simple noblemen, or even men of lower rank: they

never married them. It was too well known that love and marriage were two

different terms, and that certain old books, preserved in the libraries,

maintained the theory that married women, “possessing what maids seem

to seek,” should remain at home and never again exhibit themselves for

the pleasure of others, or even for their own. Formerly a girl of ten

years, repressed and secluded, could picture marriage as a source of

“liberty and pleasure”; and these blessings once secured are sedulously

guarded. You must be grateful to men for giving you their name and

fortune, of course; but some men are so odd! It is impossible to take too

many precautions. Many an excellent young man, pleasant enough to all

appearance, may turn out an insufferable husband.

And so it was with mingled prudence and dilettantism that these fair

sixteenth-century Americans set out in quest of the Golden Fleece. Little

hampered by parents who thought their whole duty was done when they

paid over the dowry, they learnt how pleasant it was to take life into

their own hands, to show themselves in society, to talk, laugh, dance,

frolic—live, in a word, without a by-your-leave to anyone. And yet the

Latin delicacy and grace betray themselves in various prejudices: to

practise archery, to pad themselves for a pass with the foils, or merely

to have their photographs taken as naiads—these resources were not yet

open to them! The poor things could only triumph by their charm and

enthusiasm, quite in the Latin way, at the risk of rubbing off a little

of their bloom here and there.

Outcries came from the dowagers: What! throw themselves at men’s heads

in that way! how scandalous! and how silly! Do they think then that men

are so stupid as not to consider serious qualities? For their amusement

indeed they like the coming-on disposition, but not for marriage: it

is Cinderella that attracts Prince Charming. Anne of France cites an

illustration in point: three young Germans of the highest distinction

arrived one day from the heart of their distant wilds with the sole

object of wedding the three maids of Poitiers, of whom marvellous tales

were told. It was a terrible shock when they found themselves each face

to face with his own fair damsel. The first had so squeezed her waist

that she well-nigh fell inanimate into the arms of her wooer, who was

thoroughly put out; the second chattered like a very magpie; the third

rather naïvely displayed a sentimentality in the latest mode; and the

upshot was that, with never a word to one another, the three Germans were

soon stride for stride footing it back to Germany. And Anne’s conclusion

is very reasonable: “Would it not have been better to cultivate a staider

manner?”

But it remained to be proved whether a staider manner would be right

after all, and whether a princess, of however high descent, could indulge

in the luxury of waiting at the chimney-corner until the man of her

dreams was pleased to appear. Unhappily the contrary was the general

belief. Someone has remarked that if men do not often marry the girl who

pleases them, they do not always marry the girl who displeases them. And

that is just the reason flirtation held its own.

The art of flirting is a very subtle one, and yet it is incredible how

little time was required to bring it to perfection. Everybody had to do

with it: even princesses wanted to fancy that they chose their husbands.

The young girl “came out” into the world in two ways. If she had no

mother, or her parents found it convenient to separate themselves from

her, there was in France a patriarchal custom, peculiar to that country,

which consisted in the girl’s entering the service of a “dame” or

“demoiselle” of good repute. So highly was this custom esteemed, that

Anne of France recommended her daughter to conform to it should occasion

arise, although the heiress of the duchy of Bourbon had certainly no need

of entering anyone’s service to push her way in the world.

Anne herself, and Anne of Brittany, thus kept “schools of manners”—a sort

of fashionable boarding-school, where the young men never addressed the

girls but on bended knee in the ancient style, and where the somewhat

cloistral austerity seemed mitigated by the belief that so excellent

a place and so well guaranteed a virtue could not fail to tempt the

most fastidious husbands. But this institution, intended to serve as a

bulwark against the new manners, floated along, on the contrary, in their

current: Catherine de’ Medici’s “flying squadron,” as it was called,

completely lost the character of a boarding-school, and discharged its

functions with freelance recklessness.

For the most part, it was at her mother’s side that a girl set off in

quest of a husband. The plan of operations varied so greatly that no

one will expect us to unravel its principles. All these young girls

matched one another in _chic_. They never spoke to their mothers without

bleating “Madame ma mère,” or lisping “By your favour, madam,” like so

many well-behaved silly sheep. Many of them were for ever showing their

teeth: they had a laugh for anything—a phrase, a fly, a gentleman with

a bald head. One laughing sent the others into fits too, and that was

thought remarkably witty. They were experts in the “sedate management

of their green-blue eyes, full of softness and opened neither too

little nor too much.” They wore lovely dresses—monumental robes which

yet seemed rather an accompaniment than a vesture for their limbs. Some

old folk (Vivès, for example) professed horror at their ring-loaded

fingers, their pierced ears (a barbarous custom, to be sure!), those

light, delicate touches of the brush with which they did up the face, and

those subtle perfumes wafted from no one knows where: in all this they

saw woful error, and even worse, rank folly. They sharply reprimanded

the mothers, reproaching them for a multitude of things: for withering

the natural goodness and charitableness of their daughters by fostering

expensive habits; for inciting them to a false luxury, all vulgarity

and tinsel, which is neither comely nor virtuous, and helps not a whit

towards matrimony—at least it is to be hoped so, for it would be a great

imprudence to depart so far from reality, and to entice a man into

marriage by means of the rouge-pot and sham charms.[93]

But materfamilias is a lady of fashion, accustomed to shine in society,

and seeing no harm in it; further, she is too good a mother not to desire

success for her offspring, not to applaud a venturesome flight. She,

too, has dreams of a Prince Charming; she has her enthusiasms, which

take clear and definite shape in her mind as positive hopes. As for the

father, he becomes cantankerous, and considers only the expense of the

game; he is quite of the dowagers’ opinion, and thinks well enough of

men to believe that they pay most attention to serious qualities. And

so, in order to compose once for all this perpetual domestic wrangle, a

great wag, Coquillart,[94] proposes to clothe the girls in parti-coloured

dresses, one colour for the father, another for the mother.

When a girl makes a successful start, certain mothers are seized with a

sort of fanaticism; we are wrong in calling it fanaticism: it is really

a new outburst of good-heartedness and the passion for self-sacrifice of

which women are possessed, for, if they reflected, they would clearly

realise that personally they have nothing to gain by a brilliant match

for their daughters.

Some of them push self-sacrifice to the point of servility; they efface

themselves, walk in the rear, with the meek and deprecating bearing of a

waiting-maid. That is a form of goodness which the women of former days

would not have understood—Anne of France choked at the mere mention of

it. She had commanded armies, bearded diplomatists, made men her puppets,

checkmated her judges, manipulated her States-general, set her whole

country in a ferment without a sign of feeling: but here she lost command

of herself: “It is tomfoolery ... it is overweening presumption in the

daughter, and in the mother sheer madness.”

Kisses, caresses, secret trysts, presents, love-letters, showers of

rondeaus and ballads, stolen glances, songs more than gay—all this made

French flirtation an exquisite pastime, essentially intoxicating in its

charm. The good, modest young damsel, who would cast down her eyes in the

street, was not a whit shocked at a pretty broad jest in the company of

men:

Aucunes sont, qui, en humbles manières,

Avec les folz jouent leurs jarretières.[95]

—_Bouchet._

In the evening by candle-light, ensconced in some nook of the spacious

fire-place, young men and girls would sit unceremoniously on one

another’s knees, laughing and talking nonsense. People who have got past

these maidenly frolics themselves find it more and more difficult to

become reconciled to them. Jean Bouchet feelingly describes them in his

book, _Les Regnars traversant les voies périlleuses_, at a period when

the art was still in its infancy. Young men easily get absolution: they

naturally profit by opportunities of amusing themselves; and, besides,

theirs is the passive part. But the girls! how venturesome they are, how

light-heartedly they chip, at least in spirit, the poor remnant of their

semi-virginity!

It would be a mistake to suppose that flirtation will in time lead to the

introduction of the love element into marriage. These damsels are by no

means anxious to allow the principle of earthly love—that is to say, a

germ of divorce—to steal into their married life. Their ideal consists in

falling in love with a man of wealth and established position, and so far

it has a reassuring character, worthy of respect. At this stage of their

life they are working for themselves, as later they will have to work for

humanity. M. Bourget has discovered in America the different varieties of

the sixteenth-century flirt: the professional beauty; the girl of ideas,

who stumps a platform and stands for the parish council; the “jolly good

fellow”; the girl of well-balanced philosophical mind; the coquette; the

girl of ambitions; all are ambitious and to some extent coquettish, and

even the philosophical girl gives the ideal only a secondary place.

But amid this charming round of coquetting and artless sensibility,

passion sometimes flashes out—passion, at once the great peril of the

Latin races and their eternal charm. One may be convinced that the heart

has been subdued by cold calculation, and that love is laid under a

spell by means of philosophy; but they burst their bonds! And here the

parts are not distributed as one would wish: this generation is about

to inflict a wound on platonism! Often it is the wife who, instead of

serving as an idol, gives herself to love. In the terrible veins of

French and Spanish women there flows a blood which they do not always

succeed in mastering, the old blood of knights or peasants; they bruise

themselves against the invisible mail-armour of modern life.

In the second act you would almost invariably see the serving-maid appear

on the scene—the “confidante” of the plays, a good soul, as indulgent to

everyone as she is to herself, devoted, and not more thick-headed than

becomes her, thoroughly convinced that she has something to gain from

every intrigue. The mother has her own affairs and her dignity to attend

to, which keeps her in ignorance of what is going on; whilst with the

maid there are private conversations, mutual unbosomings, a companionship

in study of the facts of life. Lucky, indeed, if some smart lackey, let

in on the strength of his ingenuous manner, does not put in his word!

Saint Theresa thus plunged with masterful strokes into the swirling tide

of existence, with the aid of a serving-maid, at the age of fifteen. Her

father placed her in a convent, but the walls were no barrier to her:

she performed unheard-of feats, broke through the roof, wrenched away

the gratings. She had to be despatched to a more reposeful situation—to

an uncle stuffed with the fathers of the church, a man after Vivès’

own heart; from his care she returned with a passion for religion, and

escaped once more, this time to enter a Carmelite convent in the teeth

of opposition. She was now in her nineteenth year, and her trials,

repentances, revolts were only just beginning; eighteen more years of

struggle were required ere this tempestuous character was at last soothed

definitively into mildness.

Unhappily, the girls’ little love affairs sometimes had graver

consequences. Plays and novels show us situations awkward enough: in one

of Parabosco’s comedies, the mother arrives a little behind the fair.

Laughing, boisterous, pitch-forked into life, the poor children do not

pretend to have the ferocious virtues that men have not.[96] Is that

their fault, since they have been brought up like men? If they go wrong,

it is not from a bent towards wrong; it is as the birdling errs, buffeted

by the storm on its first escape from the nest. To avoid risk altogether,

they would have to remain for ever under the mother’s wing, as the early

educators wished.

In the sixteenth century, there were still good people who wished girls

to become deaf-mutes again, and constitute Our Lady “the guardian and

warder of their hearts.” But such talk was not very effective.

Wise counsellors and practical preachers who advocated “retreats,” and

knew the world, addressed themselves directly to the girls and sought

to touch the chord of self-interest. The grave Jean Raulin,[97] from the

eminence of one of the most fashionable pulpits in Paris, reasoned with

them somewhat as follows: “To wed a widow, well and good! There is no

fuss, no golden ring, no benediction, but withal it is a marriage: whilst

with a counterfeit young maid presenting herself at the altar—! Ah! fair

ladies, guard your purity to the very hour of your espousals, whether you

be earthly or spiritual brides! That is the precious treasure you must at

all costs save, and for many reasons: because of human frailty, according

to the words of the 2nd Epistle to the Corinthians, ‘We have our treasure

in earthen vessels’; because of its inestimable value, according to the

words of Ecclesiasticus, chapter xxvi., ‘There is no price worthy of a

continent soul’; because of the irreparability of the mischief, according

to the words of St. Jerome, ‘God can do all things save restore a lost

virginity.’”

Many could not help regretting the free country life, and fancied that

fidelity to a more rigorous system of education would have yielded

better results. Of a truth it would have been better to make women frank

creatures of passion than coquettes or mere worldlings. But an honest

glance at the life of rural folk was enough to assure the observer that

utilitarianism does not elevate the manners. Yes, seen from a distance,

the ways of country folk seem compact of smiles and caresses, love

and candour: pigs and cows meet in the meadow or at the fair; lovers

too meet, at church, at a dance, after those winter parties so hotly

denounced by the preachers, nay, every morning and evening if their

hearts bid them; and they can exchange little presents, meet to scrape

the fiddle or twang the guitar, without anyone finding fault, save

perhaps a rival with whom they are quits for a few rounds at fisticuffs,

or at most a thrust with a knife. A fashionable young girl, you may be

sure, would not be horrified at the exchange of a few good swashing blows

for her; she is apt to regard life as too tame. It remains to discover

whether to reduce life to its primitive simplicity is really to elevate

it. The idealists thought not.

CHAPTER V

THE HUSBAND AND THE VARIOUS WAYS OF SLIPPING HIS YOKE

The most troublesome question to be settled in regard to feminism is that

of the authority of the husband. Legally, the husband was head of the

household, an idea which found ready acceptance among the lower ranks of

society, and which the people applied with its habitual logic. It won

warm approval from Rabelais. Nothing struck men as more grotesque than a

husband suspected of having allowed his wife to get the upper hand. An

artisan of Bourges, at whom some unpleasant neighbours hummed a refrain

about a woman who thrashed her husband, on that ground alone brought

against them an action for slander.

In all sincerity, the husband considered himself an absolute owner,

the lord and master, the head and soul of his wife, that “feminine and

feeble creature” whom he condescended to take to his hearth, and who owed

him, in the name of God and the law, “perfect love and obedience.” As

to the wife, she was, so to speak, stepping into a railway train driven

without her assistance. She had paid her fare, and wedlock stretched

itself rigidly in front of her like the driver’s footboard, a place for

manliness and nerve, but unromantic in the extreme. What matters to

her the scenery along the line? The rippling sea may chant its amorous

strains, the spring sun may dot the wilds with flowers, the tempest may

sweep through the gorges, but the track stretches on and on in its direct

unswerving course, with never a thrill, never a smile, unfaltering,

unreflecting, mathematically.

What was the wife but the principal servant, or the eldest of the

children? She only addressed her master with the most profound respect.

“Sir,” she would say to him, or “My good friend.” She was his “wife and

subject”; if she wrote to him she signed, “your humble obedient handmaid

and friend.” But her husband spoke to her stick in hand.

The stick! that was the only argument the women understood.

Bon cheval, mauvais cheval, veut l’esperon,

Bonne femme, mauvaise femme, veut le baston.[98]

Preachers spoke of the thrashings with a smile. Needless to say, the

police did not interfere. Margaret of France did indeed think it a little

vexatious that a lady honoured with the king’s attentions like the

beautiful Madame de Chateaubriand should still receive correction of this

sort under her husband’s roof-tree.

But this was not all: the authority of the husband was often coupled with

the tyranny of the mother-in-law. The husband’s mother, especially if she

was a widow, rendered life horribly galling and difficult.

On the other hand, the married woman, no matter to what lengths her

husband might carry his ill-usage, knew well that there was no redress

for her anywhere. Unhappy wives sometimes in the madness of despair fled

from their homes in the most shocking plight, only to be remorselessly

dragged back by their father, brother, or cousins, as a result of the

appalling freemasonry between men. To rely on her own mother was out of

the question for a wife; the two women belonged to two distinct houses,

with a barrier, a great gulf fixed between them. In the early days of

wedlock a husband, not to appear a tyrant, and because he was in no way

inconvenienced, would allow his wife now and then to visit her mother;

but he contrived that these visits became gradually rarer, and when he

was not at home, a wife careful of her repose and dignity would never

cross her mother’s threshold without first writing to him: “If it be your

good pleasure, I would fain go.”

That was a woman’s life. As it was not all smiles and rosewater, there

was good reason for marrying the girls off early, before they had learned

to care one way or another, their equipment being a few simple maxims

inculcating obedience, and some odds and ends of medical knowledge. Wives

who owed their training to Vivès could not but be very unhappy, according

to the principles of marriage held by Vivès himself. For Vivès not merely

approved of early marriages, he was also one of those who believed that

the wife was created for the husband, and an irresponsible and inferior

being; he looked at the husband as someone to bring her out. Erasmus,

Bouchet, Dolce himself, nay, everybody had much the same impression.

The supremacy of the husband was the sacred ark; bold indeed would be

the person who dared lift a hand to it! So in modern times we have seen

aesthetes, like Ruskin, capable of every possible audacity but that.

Ruskin does not understand women, and yet he has gone out of his way to

exalt their rôle in the world; but, as soon as he comes face to face with

the husband, he loses countenance, his candour vanishes, his words become

cold and colourless.

How is one to explain this singular phenomenon, that so many good and

even generous-minded men, after expressing a heart-felt sympathy with the

sufferings of women, after proclaiming their intelligence and their right

to live, falter and hide their heads when the question of liberty at home

is raised? It is not because they believe there is no more to be said. La

Rochefoucauld declares that “there are few good wives but are tired of

their calling,” to which it would be easy to reply, “There are few good

wives whose calling is not tiring.” But what is to be done? No one is

inclined to go like Plato to the root of the matter and suppress marriage

altogether. Marriage obviously necessitates a husband; it is a vexatious,

clogging, disagreeable necessity, maybe, but there are no visible means

of escaping it. A wife too is necessary; well, once a man and woman are

united in wedlock, one of the two must needs hold the reins. There are

many reasons, even physical ones, why a woman should not undertake to

earn bread for the family and to flog the husband. And so the husband

retains that right.

But if we go a little deeper into the psychology of domestic life in the

sixteenth century, we shall note other important phenomena, pointing to a

different conclusion.

To begin with, investigating facts from the outside, who was it that

complained of marriage? The man; always the man. In actual working

the woman found compensations, or at least advantages in it. For her

it was a state leading to boundless possibilities if only she cared to

open the door. The more ardent paladins of feminism, indeed, were often

disconcerted by her outwardly conciliatory attitude towards it. But the

husband, married though he was, could not forget that setting up an

establishment had involved the turning his back upon life. His chains

appeared to him, if not heavy (to him they were not heavy), at any rate

the sign of a monotonous, unvarying servitude. In the words of an old

ballad, the monk may change his order, the canon his stall, the official

his functions,

But we that be poor married men

Can neither go up nor down.

If we enquire of the spouses themselves, we find that the disagreements

and difficulties rarely sprang from the larger facts—those that were

regarded as irreparable.

Heaven seems to have taken care to arm us, in regard to important

questions, with a veritable long-suffering. There are fools, it is

true, who seriously think of keeping their wives under lock and key,

not reflecting that no better means could be devised for making them

desperate and leaving them at the mercy of Tom, Dick or Harry—the first

passing officer. Such men only get their deserts. But there are also

shrewd men who keep their eyes shut to what it is best not to see:

everybody advises them to do so, or, what is better, gives them every

assistance. There must be a special providence, even, watching over the

wives.[99] A wife, on the contrary, can hardly remain in ignorance of

her husband’s laxities, for these most often manifest themselves in the

broad daylight, and sometimes under his own roof. Many stories might be

told about chambermaids such as we read of in Scripture, but a little

too mercenary, to be sure: for the courts showed so much generosity in

assessing the damages due in such circumstances that artless little

Chloes have been known to bamboozle the judges and profit handsomely by a

mishap that was wholly imaginary.

In Italy, men of the world had a sure and simple custom, which consisted

merely in buying a young slave-girl. In the market of Venice, a pretty

Russian, a fair Circassian, a well-built Tartar girl between twenty-five

and thirty years of age would fetch from six to eighty-seven ducats.

It needs no showing how well this institution was suited to platonism;

the most eminent platonists did not disdain it. The mother of Carlo de’

Medici was a lovely Circassian girl, purchased in this way by the grave

and aesthetic Cosimo. It would never have occurred to a wife to desert

her home for such a grievance as this; to do so would have made her a

general laughing-stock. She might feel keen inward suffering; perhaps her

heart would close a little more towards the earth and open out towards

heaven; but this experience would be of use to her, and a woman who was

genuinely an idealist would almost rejoice at it. It would teach her to

show a firm and lofty front to the world, to live among her ideals, to

form a low estimate of men.

Domestic quarrels really spring from the crabbed sour virtues, the

insufferable respectabilities. Men are hard to please. One moment they

find a wife in the way: the next they expect her to be perfect. She

ought every morning, as an old author explains, to put on the slippers

of humility, the shift of decorum, the corset of chastity, the garters

of steadfastness, the pins of patience, and so on; but it is by no means

proved that in such a case a husband would not think his wife a little

over-dressed.

The wife, too, is up in arms about mere trifles—her husband’s

commonplace soul, his narrowness, his materialism, his egotism, his

gross old-bachelor ways. Her real grievances, to say nothing of her

fancied ones, are innumerable. One woman finds, instead of the “morning

dew” of her dreams, that she has espoused a lumpish lout.[100] Another,

brought up in a part of the country where hunting was the stock topic

of conversation, feels aggrieved if her husband tries to engage her

practical interest in literature or music, the result of which is so

complete a discord that the husband at last packs her off to her father,

who promptly sends her back again. Another lady is wretched because her

good man loses his appetite, and in bed does nothing but sigh; on this

foundation she builds a whole world of suppositions, and finishes by

making life impossible to the poor man, who is all the time at a loss to

know why: as a matter of fact, he has been worried about an investment.

There are some women odious because of their incessant chattering, their

tempers, their vanity. Many women are desperately fond of contradicting

their husbands, tormenting them with pin-pricks. At table a husband

inadvertently poured water into his wife’s glass. The lady handed the

glass to a footman, saying hotly: “When it is dry, I will ask for it

back.”[101] These are the things which destroy domestic happiness, which

poison a man’s life (“wine and women have their poison,” says an old

proverb), which disgust and shrivel the heart of a woman and drive her

to a life away from her home, in pilgrimages or what not. A man does not

need to be a saint to bear with a woman of easy virtue, but only a saint

can endure a wearing woman.

And so what is wanted in domestic life is a great deal of prudence and

wisdom, and as little as possible of illusions and passion. Marriage

is the most sacred bond in the world, but only so long as it is not

strained. To yield to the temptation of loving would be fraught with

great peril; that is the forbidden fruit. Champier, a philosophical

physician of the time, calls it fatal: it kills. Leaving out of account

the physical vicissitudes of life, the spirit of man is too fickle to

permit him safely to stake his life on one head.[102] Of this, Europe had

a terrifying proof.

Philip the Fair was a notorious lady-killer; and his wife Joanna, like

a genuine Spaniard, loved him to distraction. On one occasion when he

was travelling in the Netherlands, she worried herself into a sort of

prostration. One wild, bitter night, as November nights are in Navarre,

this poor Joanna, seized with a sudden hallucination, rushed out

half-clad into the courtyard of the castle of Medina del Campo. People

hurried up to her, and the governor stopped her and ordered the gate to

be shut; but the unhappy woman, her eyes starting from her head, clung

to the gate, and no human strength could tear her away. When morning

came she was still there, panting and shivering, with wild, sunken eyes.

Her mother, Queen Isabella, who was lying ill at Segovia, despatched an

admiral and an archbishop in hot haste to the castle, but neither the

archbishop nor the admiral succeeded in getting the poor mad thing away

from her gate. They only managed, with great difficulty, to induce her

to enter an adjacent shelter for the following night. Only the Queen was

able to put an end to this distressing scene, the memory of which thrills

Spain to this day. Yes, La Bruyère has well said: “Women go to extremes!

They are better or worse than we.” There lies their danger. They would

assuredly do well to beware of their ecstasies, and to keep above or

below the husband with whom it is their lot to live.

If they are reasonable and resigned, like those of whom we have to

speak, not believing in the necessity of a matrimonial passion, then the

humanists resume their dulcet strains. They have no intention of bringing

about a violent rupture, but make their appeal to finesse.

The old type of the hectoring husband, even with his bludgeon, is no

longer a terror. No one is so likely to play a puppet’s part as the man

who fancies he is monarch of all he surveys. The foolish fellow is so

convinced of his superiority that he never perceives the slender cords

by which he is led. He works like an ox,[103] and his wife calls him a

selfish beast and curmudgeon. She croaks of the workhouse if things

are not going well with him, while if everything is going smoothly she

“cockers and cossets him,” and then gets, not a beating, but a dress or

a blouse. She has tears or smiles as occasion serves, and, if need be,

practises her blandishments on the friends of the dear man. She wheedles

even Heaven itself, for all that is required to ensure peace is to bring

the shirt that her lord and master is to wear on Sunday into contact

with the altar during Friday’s mass, and there is no difficulty in that.

It is commonly said that “a woman is easy to manage provided ’tis a man

that takes the trouble”; a man is still easier to manage provided a woman

is good enough to take him in hand. In short, the women had long before

this quietly juggled away this harassing domestic problem. That is why,

despite the bogey of principles, the women thought highly of marriage.

They reconciled themselves to obedience, so long as they did not obey.

For the same reason the warmest friends of women found no better means

of combating marriage than to defend it. The men alone girded at it,

because, accustomed in their bachelor days to eat their own cake, they

did not easily get into the habit of working for a little community.

Erasmus has very cleverly summed up the situation in the form of a

dialogue between a young bride and a matron of sense and sobriety.[104]

The former makes loud outcry. “What a hell is marriage!” she exclaims,

“what a slave’s business! And for whom, ye gods! For a gambler, a brute,

a rake! ’Twould be better far to sleep with a pig!”

The other soothes her. She must take her husband as she finds him, that

is to say, a coarse animal, a sort of elephant, to be tamed with a lump

of sugar.[105] She must appear to give in to him about trifles, to put

up with some of his whims and eccentricities, and above all to lay in a

large stock of good temper and never be idle or dull, for the husband

has a perfect horror of being bored, perhaps because he is such a bore

himself, and sulkiness upsets him, especially if he is sulky. What

she must do is to leave him what he has, and give him what he lacks,

those charming possessions with which the new system of civilisation

has endowed women. She may even add a little affection, and then, one

fine day, she will be struck with astonishment (for men do not shine at

finesse) to see this rough husband of hers at her feet, and, instead of

considering her a nonentity, taking her for the image of God. From that

moment she possesses the affection she has sought; and the task is not

very difficult.

Truth compels us to add, however, that, apart from this moral recipe,

another circumstance contributed to give the women greater importance in

conjugal life. In France, as in every country where men are the ruling

spirits, they were not fond of giving the girls a dowry, or at all events

they gave them the smallest possible allowance. When the girls married,

they received a sum representing in a way what would some years before

have been called their “night-cap,” but what was then styled a “chaplet

of roses,” and they renounced all claim on the inheritance. Accordingly

a rich man did not think it at all extraordinary to wed a girl without a

fortune, since that was the usual thing. Louis de la Trémoille married

Gabrielle de Bourbon on those terms. Further, there was not the same

difference between large, middling and small fortunes as there is to-day.

With an income of three or four thousand livres, equal to £3000 or £4000

to-day, a man was thought a nabob. The husband, then, brought the money,

and in addition he guaranteed a contingent jointure on his own property,

so that it was really a home of his providing that the woman entered.

A man in those days knew nothing of that pride now universally felt in

wedding a millionaire’s daughter from Cincinnati, or even from Paris.

To marry money struck people as shameful, almost infamous. A husband

supported on his wife’s income was the object of heartfelt commiseration,

and an establishment so organised seemed unworthy of the name. No

sarcasm was keen enough for the classical “son-in-law of Monsieur

Poirier,”[106] the dapper lordling, all genealogy and sport, whose sole

accomplishment is a knack of plunging deep into debt, from which his

worthy father-in-law (who made his money in treacle) toils behind the

scenes to extricate him.

On the contrary, Monsieur Poirier was highly esteemed in industrial

countries—the Low Countries, for example, while as to the Italians,

they, openly and unashamed, regarded big dowries as at once legitimate

and desirable. They had the courage of their opinion—for instance, that

physician of Pistoja who had to choose between two girls, one of whom was

warranted a sensible creature, while the other was less sensible, but

richer by three hundred crowns. The doctor did not hesitate an instant

in choosing the richer, for in his opinion the risks were equal, and

the difference pointed out between them was not worth a few crowns. No

Italian was at all loth to marry a woman who brought him a dowry large

enough to live on. At Florence fifty crowns a year would almost keep a

household of moderate tastes, and a woman of the lower middle-class as

a rule received a dowry of two or three thousand florins, which yielded

an income of at least a hundred and fifty florins. The Visconti and the

Sforza, by means of dowries which were by all accounts colossal, got

their daughters into the principal royal houses of Europe. In short, the

Italian system continued to exercise a wonderful fascination even over

outsiders, and in starting on the expeditions to Italy more than one

French noble fancied that a rich wife would be the reward of his prowess.

It is not very surprising that these ideas at length overcame all

resistance in France. Louis XI., who was a pupil of the Sforza, did much

in this as in other things to snap the chains of the old traditions. We

have elsewhere related how lightheartedly he made and unmade marriages,

with the sole object of rewarding various adventurers at the expense of

the most honourable families.

Louis XII., on the contrary, set himself passionately to oppose these new

manners. Although he plumed himself on his chivalry as much as anyone, he

did not admit that the heat of passion could excuse the abduction of a

young girl, even if she were rich—and in such cases she was almost always

rich. His firmness did not prevent some picturesque exploits; but the

authority of the church, with its strong weapon the canon laws, lent him

aid.

We have moreover had occasion to show elsewhere how much difficulty

Charles VIII. had, after the event, in getting the legitimacy of his

marriage with the heiress of Brittany acknowledged.[107]

And so it is that, at the epoch of women’s triumph, we find in France

two distinct species of husbands. The first, without shutting their eyes

to the importance of money, refused to make it the principal question

in marriage. Undoubtedly it was unfortunate if the wife came quite

empty-handed, and in such a case a girl ran some risk of the “pain”

of remaining an old maid or falling into an unhappy plight. The most

insignificant workgirl set her heart on getting a little dower together,

even by methods not altogether innocent,[108] and we know that the

purses of princesses dribbled out a beneficent response to this desire.

But many marrying men were quite content to be fobbed off with some sort

of equivalent. Thus Louis XII. created François de Melun Count of Epinay

to induce him to marry Louise de Foix; and Louis de la Trémoille gave

twelve hundred livres to his servant, Robert Suriete, to compensate him

for the portionless condition of a pretty girl, Marie de Briethe.

The other kind of husband, which was destined more and more to outnumber

the first, saw in money, on the contrary, the real, substantial element

of wedlock. Anyone who thought that a woman would appreciate a sacrifice

made to marry her struck them as egregiously simple. The richer women

are, the better they are, as Montaigne says: there is no reason why

a man should sacrifice positive “commodities” to uncertain (and not

particularly useful) quantities such as birth, beauty, virtue, wit.

The ball once set rolling spun along merrily. Especially in Italy, the

exploitation of marriage attained imposing proportions. Indignant fathers

of families protested; the Venetian senate, composed mainly of fathers,

passed various decrees more and more restrictive, contemptuous and

scathing, but all in vain. The whole class of idle young men of fashion,

and it was a numerous one, avowedly regarded marriage as a unique means

of enriching themselves and assuring an idle life, a charmingly easy

means, too, not above the level of the meanest intelligence. Guez de

Balsac likened it to a fat prebend which does not require the holder to

become actually a canon, but which does unhappily necessitate occasional

residence.

This custom does not perhaps indicate very warm feelings on the part

of the young men, but it cannot be denied that it satisfied the secret

wishes of the women and gave a sanction to the evolution of their ideas.

From the day when they pay the household expenses, women consider

the parts reversed, and begin by assuming the most perfect liberty.

Henceforth no more constraint, no more subterfuges, no more Judas

kisses. They are now, mark you, equal[109] or superior to their husband

in those material concerns which are the essence of domesticity; and

as moreover they fancy that morally they excel the men, that they are

at once more affectionate, more chaste and more steadfast; as they are

reminded on all sides of the example of paragons like Cleopatra, they

make up their minds to be Cleopatras too. They consent, out of goodness

of soul, to try their prentice hand on their husbands. They make him

happy, sometimes even in his own despite; they are going to transform him

“from a battered ingot or a base coin into a new crown piece.” In his

heart of hearts the husband may fret and fume, call to mind the old-time

ways, wonder at his wife’s continual absences from home and her choice

of friends, and at times even try to interfere; but he is quickly given

to understand that my lady is not going to be held in a leash or shut up

in a band-box, that seraglios exist no longer. She will devote herself

to his happiness, provided he shows himself docile and recognises his

incapacity and helplessness. Ay, and let him reflect: how could he get

on without so virtuous a wife? He would go into a consumption. She is

there, regulating his expenses, his pleasures, the frets and sallies of

his temperament; she watches like a sister of mercy over his physical and

moral well-being, and it is by this means that the household represents

henceforth a unity, sound, robust, with two bodies, four arms, and two

souls.

Obviously (to repeat it once more), we have no intention of enunciating

an absolute rule. In speaking of households, we do not mean that all the

households in France were cast in the same mould, and that everywhere at

the same moment they were all acting precisely in the same way. No two

were alike.

The truth is that, one way or another, a very large number of women no

longer suffered themselves to be snuffed out, “trodden under foot,” to

use the current phrase. As to the manner in which their controlling

influence showed itself, that depended on events, tastes, how the wind

blew, circumstances. A favourite idea of Margaret of France, and

one which it would have been difficult to get out of her head, was

that women always err by their meek and quiet spirit, their excess of

long-suffering. In vain is the reply made that more than one woman

makes a virtue of necessity, and that, face to face with a violent

creature threatening to break every bone in her body, a woman needs all

her patience; Margaret protests that she would rather be flogged than

despised. This magnificent declaration sets some of the company smiling,

and enraptures the women. One pert widow alleges that she loved her

husband so much that if he had beaten her she would have killed him. “In

other words,” retorts Henri d’Albret, “you mean to rule the roost. Well,

I am agreeable, but you would have to get all the husbands to agree.”

Margaret winces under this intellectual cut; she is put out, for natural

as she would regard it for her husband to take her orders, she dares not

say so. Even she falters, and admits that the man is the natural head,

but not that he has a right to desert or maltreat his wife.[110] Can this

be Margaret? Yes, the words are her own, and are exactly to the point.

Women do lack decision—and she was the very first to show it!

Some young ladies, to elude this difficulty, thought it well to marry

a ninny—if not an absolute fool. Worthy folk were amazed and sang the

praises of mind and its attractions, “the treasures of knowledge,” and

asked them what pleasure they promised themselves. What a question to

ask! Why, since a husband was in question, they promised themselves

precisely no pleasure; nothing but money, or a name! That was how

the Duchess of Medina-Sidonia married; she espoused an income of

sixty-thousand ducats, with a grandee of Spain. True, this grandee,

when paying a visit to the archbishop, asked very politely to see the

children! There was nothing here to hinder the duchess from having as

much mind as she wanted. But it must be confessed that this was an

extreme remedy, and it would be preferable for a woman to feel and

believe herself able to mate with a man of intelligence.

Domestic manners thus underwent a profound transformation. In humble

homes the wife continued perforce to cook, to make the beds, to wash

her husband’s head and feet, with no loss of dignity. But in the great

houses, it was no longer common to find hard inelegant matrons who rose

with the sun, were continually chevying the children and servants, and

knew no pleasure but the joy of piling up well-bleached and well-darned

linen on Saturday, the housewife’s field-day. As Fourier has pointedly

observed, disdain of such mole-eyed habits is the test of a people’s

progress in civilisation.

It is much more delightful to float through life with a smile on the

lips, and to govern imperceptibly, by means of a languorous Creole grace.

Such grace abounded, and many instances of it might be given. Here is a

specimen which seems to us characteristic; it is a simple little note

from Isabella d’Este[111] to her husband, dictated to a secretary:

“My Lord,

Prithee mock not at my letter, nor say that all women are poor

things and ever smitten with fear, for the malignity of others

far exceedeth my fear and your lordship’s mettle. I should have

written this letter with my own hand, but ’tis so hot that,

if it last, we are like to die. The little knave is very well

and sendeth a kiss to your lordship, and as for me, I do ever

commend myself to you.

Longing to see your lordship,

ISABELLA, with my own hand.”

Mantua, July 23rd.

“With my own hand,” the signature and no more. It is so hot! But does

not this very air of fragility convey a charm exactly of the kind to

subjugate even a husband?

This charm does enfold him—and it keeps husband and wife apart! Seen at a

distance these distinguished women, genuinely Stoic at heart under a mask

of _abandon_, in reality overawed their lords and masters, and, even in

their private intercourse with them, kept themselves shrouded in mystery

and the unknown. Vittoria Colonna’s husband, who took little pains to be

agreeable at home,[112] became so devoted a lover of his lawful spouse

when far away as to compose in her honour a whole volume of charming

verses entitled _A Book of Loves_. This book was never published, and

has disappeared. Brantôme keenly regrets its disappearance, because,

he says, it would have given us an opportunity to see the poetry of

conjugal love, and to know if that ought to draw its inspiration from

platonic sentiments or not—from celestial love or from love legitimately

terrestrial.

Poor Brantôme! We think we can solve the question which troubles him.

The women of that time were waxing philosophic, they had set their minds

towards acquiring a good deal of knowledge and yet remaining alive,

instead of minimising themselves, humbling themselves, following behind

like a boat in tow. They had become vestals (if we may put it thus) in

regard to marriage, and considered that their true mission was to shed

abroad the love which welled over from their quivering hearts; for it is

always the lack of men that turns women into feminists. In the world they

were going to become “goddesses,” and it would be impossible any longer

to live without them.

Francis I., in a court without women, found himself getting too proud and

despotic; his gardens appeared to him “flowerless,” so he summoned and

enticed young women to him, and treated them “like goddesses in heaven.”

He shewed them their new mission.

And yet, what unsuspected depths of loathing rose to the lips of those

divine women! I do not know whether the number of women sick of their

husbands was larger than at present, but it was large enough. Pride and a

high sentiment of duty in the gaze of the world long watched over them,

like those grand statues of splendid, almost menacing virtues which the

sculptors of former days were fond of setting before a tomb, at either

end of the grave. But after they had accomplished, unostentatiously,

devotedly, the mission for which men married them, namely, kept the house

in order, loyally studied the master’s comfort, poulticed and physicked

him, borne him children, replenished the stock (pardon the expression)

like good brood-mares, and humbly occupied the foot of the table, there

came a time when this primary duty was done, and then they sprang up as

though from a sleep, and looking at the sun, enquired of him whither they

must fly to find life. They were born to sow flowers behind them. Their

children were these flowers, painfully plucked out of their very vitals

and flung into the future. It remained yet to pluck from their hearts,

with a more vivifying joy, immaterial flowers, flowers of love, flowers

of happiness, children of the soul, their real children, for if the woman

is a passive being in physical conception, in spiritual conception she

plays another part, she becomes the active being. The seed is hers to sow.

By this time they were no longer at the “angelic age,” as Alfred de

Vigny called it, namely, fifteen years. As a rule, they might confess to

thirty, the age when women have “a spice of the devil,” the age at which

one ought to know how to deal with soul and heart.

The sort of revolution they brought about was no new thing. There always

had been and always will be women of thirty years, quite aware of their

age; but these were in addition keen-sighted, psychological women, who

meant to get to the bottom of the phenomenon and measure its intensity

with the eye of a connoisseur, for it seemed to them that they were

entering into life.

The children, who had been the _raison d’être_ of the home, were about

to go out into the world, or had already gone. As soon as he could,

the first-born son, that dear little boy whom the mother loved, asked

and obtained a little money and disappeared. Henceforth he was hardly

mentioned; he now had his own affairs, his own pleasures, and when he

wrote it would be a postscript, affectionate but rather concise: “Madam,

I had forgotten to write and say I have learnt that you have given me a

little brother named Guy. I beseech you, Madam, see him well nourished,

for I love him well.” Sometimes news came that, far away, Death had

rudely snapped the last remaining tie, and from the truly heroic words

which then burst from certain courageous mothers’ hearts, we see how

hardened their souls had become, and how the noblest and most dearly

loved of them had been compelled, in their thorny life, to form the

painful but admirable habit of sacrificing their affections to the very

uttermost. Gabrielle de Bourbon was announcing to her officers the death

of her only son, killed at Marignan. Aloud she said: “in this battle that

the King has won”; but in a whisper she added: “which has brought such

heavy woe upon us.”

That sweet women whose very nature is to love should go out, when all

fails them thus, into the world, like the bees of God, to gather a little

honey and labour for the common hive, is not very surprising. They prefer

“a little love from many to a great deal from one,”[113]—especially when

that one does not love them!

And so marriage comes to serve them as a refuge when on their

honey-quest. It is like the lodge in which hunters take up their

quarters, to be nearer their game and to shelter themselves from the

weather. The women rejoice at having it. Nevertheless, before studying

these emancipated women as they play their part manlike away from home,

we have still to examine a final objection of principle, which was strong

enough to hold some of them back.

Many moralists, even without bias against feminism, reproach the women

with owing their philanthropy to a horror of marriage; according to them,

the mission to the world upon which the women wished to enter was for

them a means of evading their domestic duties.

That is not the fact. Without appealing to the obvious arguments, we

wish for no other proof of the women’s good intentions than their very

manifest desire not to carry their separation from their husbands beyond

a certain point. They did mean to render their bonds lighter, and even

elastic. But, as we have already seen, they defended the institution of

marriage and affectionately tended their husbands in sickness; and it is

certain that they had no wish to lose them.

Divorce originated in the masculine countries. It appeared a step in

advance, because hitherto public opinion had shown itself singularly

cruel in regard to separated wives. There was neither pity nor justice

for them. The husband had no shame in deserting his wife, and it was

always she who was blamed.

To put a stop to separations, the Senate of Venice, evidently convinced

that as men they were not there for nothing, prescribed in 1543 a system

which was simplicity itself. All separated women were metaphorically

to be buried in a heap; they were forced to wear a special costume

like lepers, and were forbidden access to any public place. The clergy

revolted. In the end, the august Senate contented itself with a milder

punishment; it placed the unfortunate women under the surveillance, not

of the state police, but of their ex-husbands.

But a time came when the Venetian measures no longer appeared feasible,

and then in the countries where men ruled opinion it was generally

admitted that woman, being a secondary creature, needed an owner and

employer. Instead of trampling upon her when she found herself without

a master, they deigned to do her so much justice as to provide her with

a new lord. Calvin, generous soul, permitted her, in case of proved

desertion, to take another mate.

In the Roman countries, deserted wives were objects of compassion. But

marriage remained indissoluble; there was no remarriage; and a woman in a

country where women were a force had nothing to gain by placing herself

in a false position. All that Roman charity could do was to throw open

houses of refuge where she might find a retreat in honour and solitude.

The true way of getting rid of a husband was to keep him.

Nor did the women, even the more philosophic of them, find any

substantial advantage in being widows.

Certainly we must make some deductions from the rather theatrical

demonstrations customary at death-beds. The custom was an old one, dating

from the time when it was agreed that in losing her master a woman lost

her all; these poor women were stricken to the heart-core, and thrilled

with an emotion half comic, half touching. That was their manner of

receiving their liberty; it seemed as though they had nothing left them

but to die themselves, especially if they were young, and for some time

everyone seemed of that opinion. In lugubrious and lachrymose tones

their friends would remind them of overpoweringly wonderful examples:

Artemisia, who drank her husband’s ashes in a cup of water; Portia,

Cato’s daughter and wife of Brutus, who, on learning of her husband’s

death, finding no knife at hand, did not seek one but swallowed live

coals. Those who had simply opened a vein or cut their throat, or who had

without ado plunged a dagger in their heart, were past numbering. We can

realise what delicacy, what aristocratic charm there was in the Indian

widow’s suttee.

But for her children, who after reconciling her to marriage reconciled

her to life, Louise of Savoy would have died on the corpse of her

husband; so, at least, Jean de Saint-Gelais, her chamberlain, assures

us, and he was suspected, only too reasonably, of over-familiarity with

the secret tastes of his mistress. But for her religious scruples the

beautiful Isabella Richisentia had killed herself on the body of Raymond

de Cardoña.[114] Bouchet and Moncetto, nicknamed Lycurgus, deliberated in

great distress of mind whether they should persuade Mary of England[115]

to live, after the death of Louis XII.; they reminded her of Lucrece,

Penelope and others, and Moncetto wore himself out in speaking of them to

her in every known language and in verse. But for the young Englishman

she espoused only a fortnight later, Mary, perhaps, would have died.

As a rule these widows, like reasonable creatures, at last made up their

minds to live, under pressure from those about them; but it was also

customary for them to display at least gorgeous mourning finery.[116]

Let us first see how they buried their husbands.

There were quiet women like Anne of France who contented themselves with

the celebration of a very impressive service, and to all appearance shed

no tears, for they spoke neither of drinking the powdered bones of the

dead man nor of spending the rest of their life in the bed of the dear

departed. Anne of France indeed considered these proceedings as “useless,

unworthy and detestable follies”; the only mourning that appealed to her

was simple, silent and lasting. But more than once people were staggered

at the quantity of tears women’s eyes could contain. “Vainly do they

tear their cheeks and dishevel their hair; I go off and enquire of a

chambermaid or of a secretary how they were, how they lived together. We

would much rather they laughed at our death, if they would but smile on

us while we live.”[117]

A Spanish lady, the Countess of Consentana, in officially notifying

her vassals of the death of her husband, signed herself, “The sad and

unfortunate countess,” and, the better to indicate her distress, she

dropped two ink-blots where her name should have come. The facetious

vassals replied to their “sad and more than very unfortunate countess” in

an address which, in their agitation, they all signed with enormous daubs

and flourishes. Spain smiled, from Bilbao to Gibraltar.

So a widow left nothing undone to show how much she deplored her

solitary condition. To this first conclusion we must add a second not

less manifest: almost every widow strove earnestly to regard her husband

as alive, so true is it that her aim was to act under the shadow of a

husband as little in her way as she in his.

Of all the species of husbands, the dead husband is the one who would

require the most special monograph. However little heroic his life

may have been, his widow made it her business to sing his praises in

public. A woman whose married life had notoriously been one of discreet

indifference, if not of discord, would spend her nights and days in

celebrating the glory and the memory of the dead man. So profoundly would

she identify herself with him in heart that ere long she would develop

into the widow of a great man and rise into a superior atmosphere. The

greatnesses which the deceased perhaps never possessed she first gave

him and then appropriated herself, and in the fire of this love she was

gradually consumed. Besides, sometimes she happened actually to have got

past the age for love.

Margaret of France consoled herself frankly enough for the loss of the

Duke of Alençon; but Vittoria Colonna never ceased to address sonnets

to her captain, and when she was urged to marry again, her reply was

simple: “My husband Ferdinand, who to you seems dead, is not dead to me.”

Diana of Poitiers manipulated this principle of “beyond the grave” with

wonderful dexterity: she never was a widow. Her husband was dead, to be

sure, but she displayed as her device an evergreen tree-stem springing

from a tomb, with the words: “Left alone, she lives in him.” As late

as 1558, at the moment of her greatest worldly triumphs, she remained

faithful to him.

Here, then, we have reached a second and a very important point: a woman

of the world, so to speak, had her husband’s soul packed in straw (like

her china), and in principle she always considered herself as a wife.

In regard to the employment of their widowhood the widows fall into two

classes. First there was the widow of the classical traditional school,

who no longer belonged to the world, but buried herself in her maternal

duties or in charitable work. She was only a survival of the old-style

housewife, of whom a good many were produced even in the sixteenth

century. For example there was Anne of Polignac, who, in her retreat

at Verteuil, where she divided her time between her children and a

splendid library, amazed the Emperor Charles V. with her well-regulated

and dignified life. Again, there was Charlotte d’Albret, the widow of

Caesar Borgia; she was a little more worldly, and by nature fond of show,

splendid plate, magnificent jewels, and a large retinue.

These widows were administrators of the first order; so far as the

interests of the family were concerned, it was an advantage, as a proverb

ran, “for the husband to go first to earth.” They excelled in getting

full value for their money; sometimes even they were not averse to

dabbling in usury: Charlotte d’Albret rather liked it. It would certainly

not have been safe to reckon on their alleged feebleness; some of them

were of mettle enough to mount the ramparts like Catherine Sforza. After

the death of Grisegonelle Frottier, various relatives of his conspired

to capture by force of arms the manor of Blanc which belonged to him.

His widow, Françoise d’Amboise, learning of their plot, immediately

appealed to the “picaulx,” a brotherhood of Poitevin knights who were

vowed to protect widows and orphans; and instead of leaving her cause to

the halting march of justice, she organised an expedition and overthrew

her adversaries. In spite of the rather energetic character of the

proceeding, Louis XI. was touched, and willingly gave his pardon.

The most of these good widows spent a part of their life in convent

chapels, and it was in this direction that a breach was made in their

spirit of economy, for, according to pious authors, the devil worms his

way through the vestry door. They would meet there a lay brother, charged

with the duty of nurturing simple souls into fruitfulness. Beginning by

sending some delicious tarts in exchange for a _De Profundis_, the ladies

would by degrees make up their minds to found a chapel, then to have it

decorated, then to endow it.

Or they received charming letters from the good nuns: “We are poor women

whom your departure has left in distress, and we may say that we have

lost all the good of life.... We are still wearing the cloaks you made

for us, and we are going without pelisses, as our custom is. The convent

has not changed since you left us ... except it be that we suffer cruelly

from cold during the winter.”[118]

Many grave and strong-minded widows, after having mingled in affairs,

took advantage of their widowhood only to forget a world in which their

heart had not found sustenance. So soon as they had fulfilled unavoidable

duties, it was a pleasure to them to distribute their property and retire

from the world. We can hardly realise how the vision of a few sweet,

peaceful years consecrated to the soul haunted the hearts of women whom

the evil star of too high birth had flung into political affairs.

Such was the end Margaret of Austria[119] would have desired.

Such was actually the end of two exquisite princesses of the house of

Lorraine: Margaret of Lorraine, duchess of Alençon, who first connected

herself with a hospital, then with the strict order of the Poor Clares;

and Philippa of Gueldres, who entered the same sisterhood when her son

ascended the throne. She lived with them for twenty-seven years in the

deepest humility, styling herself “a worm of the soil,” though her

companions might continue to call her “our reverend Mother the Queen.”

The new generation was to see little of these sublime modesties. The

majority of widows lived in the world; but what liberty they enjoyed

they bought very dear, and on the whole they had less liberty than

wives. They were gay and did not darken too often the vestry-door;

they did not flaunt the time-honoured widow’s cap, still dear to

Englishwomen—headgear that would disgust anybody with widowhood. Was that

a crime? By no means; and yet the slightest slip or suspicion of a slip

was in them unpardonable. Men saw in every widow either a naughty woman

or a hypocrite, and they did not shrink from saying so. A physician was

once bargaining for a mule in the presence of a fair widow, and said

he: “I want one that’s a widow”: and as the dealer did not understand

him, he added: “Yes, a widow, that is, plump, and light on her heels,

and a good feeder.” The saying ran: “If a man thinks his wife a little

too thin, he had better make her a widow.” A widow was regarded only as

so much raw material; and from the moment when “Goodman Danger” was no

longer at hand, sin itself seemed to lose its sweetness. Widows were

recommended to frequent none but deserted chapels, to contemplate the

crucifix during the night. This condescending pity sprang sometimes from

good-heartedness; but it was often odious to them, and all the more so

because everyone, even the most confidential servants, fancied they

had a right to throw in their sympathetic suggestions. Anne of France

was indignant at this universal treason, which shocked her sense of

right.[120]

And yet society added one more tyranny. For a widow to marry again was

scarcely tolerated.[121] She would have been just as severely chided

for finding a second husband as she would have been for not finding a

first.[122] She would be sooner forgiven for a frailty, a yielding to

temptation, than for contracting a new tie. What woman was this who had

not had too much of one husband, and was not amply satisfied? Among

the people she was favoured with a sort of skimmington ride. Margaret

of France defied the prejudice and married again: it was in sooth the

deed of a philosophic woman. But in general, widows were still chained

to their widowhood by various considerations; in the first place, the

practical difficulty of finding another husband. Men were quite ready to

court a widow, but very few would make the sacrifice involved in marrying

her. A woman no longer young, a “shelled peascod,” who no longer had

anything to give and had settled habits of her own, was the antipodes

of the little maiden of twelve so much in request. Besides, the widow

herself was enjoying a large and tranquil life, thanks to the jointure

of which a second marriage would deprive her; sometimes the whole of

her husband’s fortune had come to her on condition that she devoted

herself to the children. She held in all matters the authority which had

belonged to the dead man, and indeed it was not uncommon for the husband

expressly to bequeath her this authority in his will.[123] The drawback

to this life of business management is precisely that a woman loses in it

something of the bloom of her grace and sweetness, she no longer needs

to employ persuasiveness and love since she has force at her disposal,

and the result is that she becomes a sort of man, and acquires some

of the defects by which she has suffered at the hands of her husband.

We can thus understand quite well that a woman who wishes to remain a

woman will do her best, for her own security and charm’s sake, to live

under the fostering wing of a precious memory, and will cherish with the

utmost devotion her (so to speak) posthumous husband. There lies her real

strength.

The Renaissance woman, then, a woman of essentially fine grain, and well

versed in everything it was her business to know, was a woman of absolute

sincerity, and we must believe her when she speaks well of marriage. She

considered that institution as perfectly reconcilable with the fulfilment

of a mission in the world, indeed as favourable, almost indispensable, to

it. She had no more reason to give up marriage than to give up eating and

drinking: it is not this that enchains the soul. The idealists differed

from the utilitarians solely in the belief that one marriage is enough:

the former covered their faces if a widow, not ethereal enough to satisfy

them, went by on the arm of a new husband; the latter applauded, and

fancied that by this transaction the animal nature was held in check. But

this is of little interest to us. The only result important to note is

that a woman, without ceasing to be a woman, could win freedom for her

affections and her activities as well as a man. When she had attained

that condition of liberty, she ascribed all the honour to marriage, and

blessed it instead of thinking that she owed everything to herself.

Marriage, like many human inventions, is a contrivance capable of

producing either liberty or tyranny, and women had simply altered its

direction.

They wielded intimate and domestic powers. Their rival was not the

husband, they came to terms with him; it was the man who looked after

their body or their soul, and to whom, out of weakness or indolence,

they were led to attach themselves like an anaemic ivy-plant. To mark

their place in this world they had themselves to learn how to obtain

what brings happiness: health of body and of soul. Respected in regard

to the body, it remained for them to gain self-respect in regard to the

soul, and to show that true Christianity consists in bestowing power and

liberty, not in withdrawing them.

BOOK II. LIFE IN THE WORLD

CHAPTER I

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

Margaret of France said, very incisively: “The defect of women is

timidity.” They are born to fear.

Women had become habituated to a passive and secondary part. They desired

to escape from it, they felt the need of activity and a freer air, their

wings were growing and they adored intellectual liberty, at any rate

they said so—and they had in fact already snapped many of their chains;

but when you come to close quarters and exchange confidences with them,

you perceive that they are still held fast by a multitude of secondary

diffidences, by tenuous invisible threads starting often enough from

social conventions of little or no importance. They are unable to wing

their flight, or they require a man to go first and shew them the way; or

an absolute necessity, an enthusiasm, an impulse of devotion is necessary

to start them off.

They move at last, not through reasoning, but as the result of the more

or less vague sentiment that while their home-life has brought them no

love, yet they are made for love and have a love mission to fulfil.

A modern aesthetic writer—but a man after all and only moderately

sensible—has thus explained the appeal of grace as it affected himself:

“I had nothing to love. For me my parents were in some sort only the

visible powers of Nature.”[124] How much more does this apply to women!

They want something to love! Separated from her family the wife finds in

her husband the incarnation, in the fullest sense of the word, of the

visible power of Nature, and so it is that the ardent instinct drawing

her towards the light is very complex, much interwoven with pain and

passion; it is a thirst for love almost cruel in its intensity. Just as

the husband wins honour for himself by means of external activity and

public service, so the wife hears destiny making a similar appeal to

her. Around her there is a life to diffuse, a sweetness to sow, hungry

folk to feed, wounds to dress, a great cry of distress and hardship to

soothe; and act she must. A tradesman’s wife may shut herself up in the

narrow egotism of her back shop. Could a woman of heart shut her eyes to

the profound unrest of society? Ought she to remain a helpless pawn on

the board, a mere victim? Was she not called to take her share, as an

intelligent and free creature? Willy nilly, she must step forth from her

house—burst her shell and wing away! At twenty it is excusable to confuse

one’s ideals with life; ten or fifteen years later this illusion has

dissolved. One feels then the need of setting one’s heart upon some firm,

sure, noble spot out of reach of the swirling tide of existence; and a

day thus arrives when every woman capable of reflecting and of loving

throws a questioning look on what is around her.

And then, what answer does she get from the great mystery of life?

She sees a gigantic system of force and matter in interaction, set

in motion, working, displaying itself under the silent impulse of an

invisible power, and having neither existence nor beauty apart from an

end external to itself. The governor of this world is man, endowed with

an intelligence more potent than matter, so that he finds himself placed

here below as the ambassador of life and the type of beauty. He himself

obeys practically one only motive power, love; he cannot be strongly

stirred save by passion. Thus the whole world obeys the law of beauty

and of love. Truth and goodness form, so to speak, its skeleton; beauty

is its life; love, the instrument of its life. Certain modern aesthetes,

seeking to establish an antinomy between man and Nature, represent man

as a foe who in employing Nature necessarily violates and deforms her,

whereas left to herself she would be always lovely.[125] To subordinate

man to Nature in this way seems to us untrue and disastrous. Surely the

contrary is the case: we may put anything to wrong uses, but material

forces cannot but gain if we direct them aright. Our part is to live in

harmony with Nature, conformably to the magnificent and universal law

that love grows by spending itself. “Go and give all your goods to feed

the poor,” says the Gospel: that is nobility! Sow, give: give always!

Give the labour of the arm to the fields as yet sterile; give your heart

to hearts that are dull and dead! Beauty and niggardliness cannot live

together. At one end of the scale there are those who are incapable of

giving, frozen hard, as it were, against love: at the other are those who

in a splendid profusion of generosity pour out their gifts without taking

count of them: and the whole world lies between. From the pebble sensible

only to mechanical attraction, to the flower that scents the air, one

profound idea holds good, one great song rises, all mortal things cry

in unison, and the burden of their united voices is, love. Every moving

thing tends to entwine itself about something else, to unite inextricably

with it; all life tends to pour itself into another, to surrender itself,

and thereby it has a second birth, and all individual vibrations coalesce

into one grand note. And, above this symphony of material things, the

heart of man outpours itself in similar strains in the spiritual spheres

of true life which stretch up to God. The love of man, to adopt the

phrase in the _Imitation_, is a cry flung out towards God.

Love, then, is the ruling principle of the world, a noble, superb,

necessary thing; extending its broad wings it easily dominates the

littlenesses and conventions of life, responds to all needs, whether of

the individual soul or of society, sets frail hearts athrob with life.

But it is obvious, too, what a strife it is sure to excite, by its double

nature, between spirit and matter—a strife wonderful and delightful and

fierce.

Women are so constituted as to understand this sharp antagonism between

material love and spiritual love—women, who, at a certain crisis of

life, feel so strongly the contrast between the cruelties and ironies

of material things and the refinements of the heart. They drag about a

body often feeble, suffering, wretched, a misshapen, bleeding, shamefast

body, a pain-stricken body, born for love and worship, but subdued to

the surgeon. There comes a time when they would fain forget the animal

and wash it of its impurities if possible; their soul has become more

intensely spiritual. If they shudder at the recollection of certain

physical necessities, through that very fact the secret of happiness

appears to them simpler, more luminous, less clogged with matter;

branded by life, as certain mystics bore the brands of divine love, with

sides pierced and limbs explored and broken by the hands of men, they

are athirst for love, enthusiasm and worship, they understand that no

intellectual hair-splitting, no doctrinal analysis, is worth a snatch of

love. They know the sweetness of things. I will go farther: they know the

extraordinary influence of moral forces on physical health; the body,

like society at large, needs to be reinvigorated by soul and heart.

The truth strikes upon them vividly by a sort of intuition. But it is far

from being the case that all women are able to profit by it, because they

have to reckon with a thousand practical obstacles: they require great

liberty of mind and a large share of energy if they are to avoid being

restrained by a host of more or less respectable prejudices, conventions,

and usages. After all, timidity, indifference and frivolity are very

natural things.

Particularly in France, women needed genuine courage to assert their

resolution to act and take part in social work, in the midst of a society

essentially constituted to prevent them from giving effective expression

to their ideas—a society that was strenuous, Philistine, utterly strange

to philosophy and imaginative thinking, hidebound to traditions of very

rudimentary common-sense and a proud simplicity, composed of families

desirous of living in their own fashion under the direction of their

head, with no grand notion of forming parts of one stupendous whole. The

king was the head of the principal family; on this account, men showed

the most artless veneration for his person, but so long as the army was

duly organised and the frontiers properly defended at the least possible

expense, they troubled themselves very little about their sovereign’s

existence. So the despotic power of the husband was not merely domestic,

but political: the man was lord of the lands and the village as he was

of his wife, and he administered the whole without stirring up many

ideas, in intimate communion with his oxen and his oaks. Again and

again we find in portraits the rubicund faces of these honest-eyed

country squires. There was nothing extraordinary or gigantic about such

a man; he was a man of iron, that was all; and beside this substantial

creature vegetated, half-stifled, that fine and precious flower his wife,

sometimes a frail delicate thing with liquid eyes charmingly veiled, all

compact of concentrated passion, placid tenderness, and impressionability.

On the other hand, in strange contrast with this individualistic society

which lived in isolation as a matter of principle, there then flourished

at court, in the cities, and in certain great châteaux an extremely

active society, that of the salons. Effervescent, noisy like fresh

arrivals, ceremonious, gilded, of a refined and factitious elegance,

it represented what many writers called the “theatre of the world”:

marvellous stage scenery, which underwent remarkable transformations

under the shifting play of the side-lights, forming a background against

which the players strutted through their parts. Who were these actors?

Whence came they, whither were they going? These were questions about

which often enough there was little information and less concern;

sometimes it was thought best to ignore them altogether, for, thank

heaven! it was not to grow mouldy in the depths of the country that a

man intrigued, nor was assassination a means towards opening a grocer’s

shop. Occasionally, and usually when the curtain fell on a financial

act, someone disappeared, but without tragic accompaniments, and then

(except Semblançay,[126] who was hanged) he reappeared and went on with

the pantomime. There was nothing but praise for the noble use Admiral

de Graville made of his princely fortune, which was the object of some

discussion. Du Plessis so cleverly extricated himself from the toils of

justice that he could bequeath to us the admirable Cardinal Richelieu.

The Bohiers, Briçonnets, Robertets, Duprats,[127] and many another,

small or great, erected in all security their splendid châteaux, triumphs

of art, but a sort of affront to the old machicolations crumbling in cold

neglect under the moss. In those days Gold was king.

All this splendour and grace, this brilliant life, which seemed bound

to make everything around dim by comparison, nevertheless by no means

dazzled the common herd, but at first aroused a feeling of repulsion,

if not of jealousy. Outcries arose. Wealth was apparently losing its

character of a kindly and patriarchal simplicity, to bring into greater

prominence the figures of proud and self-important men who believed their

wealth would purchase everything—virtue, wit, honour, as easily as a

rare picture. A poor man accordingly was set down as a “soulless body”;

the virtuous man was one who lived in a palace, while the man who gave a

dinner-party was a master-mind.

To tyranny of this sort there was added the individual or social

misfortunes of a society naturally unstable and continually recruiting

itself by means of speculation. Thence arose outcries: “You make so many

poor folk cry alack! alack! that we long to see you fall headlong in the

dust!”[128]

Gold and pleasure were the deities to whom we owe the charming eighteenth

century. But they lead to revolutions. This fact came out clearly, too

clearly in fact, in Italy, and compelled men to endeavour to restrain

these two great world forces within wholesome limits. In the fifteenth

century Christian socialism reared its head high at Florence and Rome,

and under stress of its menaces a science of philosophy came to birth.

In presence of this social peril, certain men, compelled to issue

from their egotism, pointed out the road for timid women to follow

to avoid vengeful reprisals. Men of affairs, bankers, notaries and

others banded themselves together with the firm resolution of forgoing

business, interests, ambitions, even their for the most part despotic

hopes in state intervention, of seeking to practise self-devotion, and

of borrowing, if necessary, something of the idealism of philosophers

and artists, so that they might give a practical sanction to their high

station by working to raise others. The Florentine people swallowed

the bait; at once ardent and refined, they admirably blended practical

reasoning with ideal aspirations. And so the first step was taken.

However, it was more particularly at Rome that this idea, still

rudimentary and ill-defined, of purifying life and pursuing social

happiness by means of the tender charm of the Beautiful made progress.

It found there a well-prepared soil. Intellectual culture and elegance

of speech did not represent at Rome, as they did elsewhere, a mere

ornamentation, they were the very substance of the state. Money was

intellectualised as regards its origin and its end, and nowhere had men

a better conception of an oligarchical society, a republic regulated by

absolute power. The heads of the church formed a unique world of their

own, as little tainted by the military or frivolous character with

which certain aristocracies were reproached as by the taste for coarse

pleasures natural to some self-made men. They showed indeed a living

example of a true aristocracy, in the exact signification of the word,

that is to say, a body of men of varied degrees of rank, raised high

above the common run of men by some eminent gift—some by high political

position or distinguished birth, others by a large fortune, others by

great accomplishments, renowned virtue, profound learning, striking

talents. They abhorred cliques and their pettinesses; to greatness

of position should correspond greatness of ideas. And this splendid

aristocracy, thus composed of the choice flower of society, delighted

in tracing its descent from remote ancestors. It set no store either on

high ancestry (though some were of brilliant descent), or on a display

of wealth (though some had enormous fortunes); it ventured to connect

itself with all the most illustrious and conspicuous names in the past

history of the human race from the time of the Greeks and Romans: Plato,

Socrates, Archimedes, and Cicero were its ancestors. And thus, with a

strange persistence, it constantly tended to lift into its own ranks by

its example, its doctrines and its easy accessibility all men who felt

within themselves a spark of genius or talent, or even ambition merely.

This atmosphere was very favourable to the development of the theory

of social aesthetics of which Castiglione has etched the principal

features. “Luxury must be opposed, even if we have recourse to

law; social life must be given a moral and governmental goal; to

keep the appetites under, the laws must find effectual support in

custom. The power of a single ruler fosters corruption; but it has

this advantage—that wisdom, goodness and justice are more easily

found in a single individual supported by strong traditions than in

a fortuitous assemblage of obscure citizens.” What is wanted is to

institute a kingship in the world for which justice and beauty are the

qualifications, and which is thus more real and of a diviner right than

any other. Mammon, that is, the love of gold, the love of power and

pleasure, can only reign in a world of night, when we have eyes but

cannot see, when we have lips from which no human cry issues, when we

are dead to enthusiasm, and when our whole life consists in eating and

drinking.

In France the socialist danger, presenting itself in a much less acute

form, could not produce the same effects. The people who were to show

their teeth fifty years later were as yet silent, and there was no

anxiety about the future except among the cultivated classes. Moneyed

people bore themselves with becoming modesty, and remained on the best

of terms with the most notable representatives of the old nobility. But

the nobility, being no longer feudal, was no longer of much account,

and a moral crisis of exceeding gravity took place in the ranks of this

aristocracy based wholly on birth and fortune. Sheer vanity took the

place of pride; the “smoke”[129] of titles became a more powerful motive

than the love of glory.

The great financiers almost all became barons, in order to get above

finance; the holders of fiefs became barons, counts and marquises.

Ordinary mortals came to hold fiefs; the most insignificant dovecot

was transformed into a château. Society moved on a step, and everybody

was satisfied. It was quite a steeplechase in the Italian style.

Pontanus,[130] for all his malicious ridicule of it, had himself

vainly solicited the title of baron. The good duke of Urbino, a great

philosopher whose elevation was of very recent date, employed the

assassin’s knife to put out of the way a girl of the lesser nobility whom

his eldest son loved and wished to marry, and Louise of Savoy warmly

approved of this magnificent implacability.[131]

Pedigrees assumed wonderful proportions. Only those who had the moral

simplicity of Margaret of Austria were content with the ancient

kings of Germany for ancestors; every Scottish archer, no matter how

insignificant, claimed descent from the ancient kings of Scotland. Louise

of Savoy made a beginning by modestly connecting the French house with

the most ancient of royal dynasties, that of Babylon.

Some went even farther. They dived into the remote and shadowy depths

of history, the ages of stone and iron, when some wild girl became

their ancestress through a chance meeting with a savage in a wood, and

when five minutes’ rain instead of sunlight would have been enough to

wash a whole race of men from the page of immortality. Anne of Brittany

was descended from one of the giants sprung direct from mother Earth.

Rabelais with great gravity presents his hero to us in his exact style as

son of one of the original sons of Earth: “Would to God,” he adds, “that

everyone was as well acquainted with his pedigree from the time of the

Flood!”

But in reality, under cover of these novel and pedantic vanities, money,

with its brutality and vulgarity and appeal to vulgar minds, led the

dance and dragged the pick of the nation pellmell after it. The Balsac of

the time, Robert de Balsac, fills a good many pages with examples of the

crowd of worldlings who, as he expresses it, hurried in unbridled, almost

frantic haste on the road to beggary.[132] There are voluptuaries,

debauchees, spendthrifts, men gorged with gold, yet athirst for more,

tumultuously dashing on and upwards in frightful torment and agitation

towards a will o’ the wisp; one after another they fall headlong into

the gulf, while the foreground is filled with the eternal procession

moving on with slow pace and clockwork regularity. Alongside of this mad

insolent triumph of gold fierce hatreds develop, and men begin to speak

under their breath of the horrible triumph of wretchedness approaching,

and can foretell the hour when materialism from below will make its awful

response to materialism from above.

Women ought to have remedied this state of things. They ought to have

prevented men from becoming besotted and ruining themselves. Anne of

France dared not suggest to all these idle nobles that they might occupy

themselves with intellectual things, but she was anxious at least to

brace them up by a life of physical endurance. Without military courage,

she declares, the nobility resembles “a withered tree,” without valour

“it is nothing worth.”

What she was losing hope of, a fraction of the clergy set themselves

to win. There was, among the mass of cassocked peasants and rochetted

aristocrats, a small group of cultivated men drawing its inspiration from

the Cardinal of Amboise,[133] less audacious than Rome, less retrograde

than Germany. These recognised the traditional merits of military glory,

birth, and money, but would have liked to reconcile them with the newer

virtues, blend them together into one radiance, homogeneous like the

sunbeam, which is composed of colours so various; they would have liked

to see all these glories combining, as at Rome, into one rainbow-like

effulgence. A monk of Cluny, Clichtoue, begs, beseeches well-born young

men to shun the enervating paths of infatuation, idleness and vice. He

has endless examples showing the possibility of alliance between literary

tastes[134] and the military life; he reveres the principles of rank

so highly as to discern them in application everywhere, even among the

metals; but he longs ardently to bind into one sheaf all the vital

forces of society; he is a philosopher, one may even say a sort of John

the Baptist. He proclaims Plato; he is more scriptural than Luther, and

has as much antique culture as any Roman prelate;[135] to him the future

seems to outline itself clearly. “After virtue,” he says, “a noble can

have no comelier ornament than letters. Philosophy is not the recipient,

but the source of nobility.” He adjures distinguished men to pay real

attention to the social obligations incumbent on them, under penalty of

losing their rank. He does not disavow the natural pleasure a man takes

in the thought that he has had ancestors and will have descendants, but

to him this does not seem a sufficient though an honourable aim in life.

If no means are found of uniting the two nobilities, that of the body and

that of the mind, no doubt (in his opinion) the nobility of the mind will

get the upper hand; Solomon, who is not generally considered a modern or

even a socialist, had already said so long ago: “I myself also am mortal,

like to other men, and am sprung from the terrestrial lineage of the

first man. And in the womb of a mother was I moulded into flesh. And I

also, when I was born, drew in the common air and fell upon the kindred

earth, uttering, like all men, for my first voice the self-same wail: in

swaddling clothes was I nursed, and with watchful cares. Who among the

kings had any other beginning? All men have one entrance into life, and a

like departure.”

Clichtoue, however, as well as his friends the Lamennais and

Montalemberts of the period, confined himself to counsels and

prognostics, which indeed the future was in great part to justify; he had

not yet discovered the exact formula. He had it at the tip of his tongue,

but could not give it utterance; it seemed as though in France the words

‘beauty’ and ‘love’ were no words for a man or a churchman. These noble

and lofty words were to come from a higher sphere, and from women’s lips.

It was Margaret of France who at last uttered them, and they were echoed

around her.

Here we find the remedy so ardently sought for against materialism, as

Jean Bouchet explains it on Margaret’s behalf: “To purify the world, to

eliminate its coarser elements; to give wealth only the lowest place as a

source of social distinction, and even then only on condition that the

plutocrat lives nobly, that is to say, unselfishly, and makes noble deeds

his constant study.” True nobility is not a cockade, a label, a name, but

a moral reality; “it springs from the soul, and not from wealth.” Noble

and lofty spirits are recognised precisely by their innate simplicity;

they leave the gildings, the pompous blazonments, to “the sons of

swineherds, sempsters, stockingers, and other mechanical folk. But

those who are illustrious by long descent reveal their nobility beyond

possibility of mistake, for they have in them something, I know not

what, of naïve goodwill that manifestly separates them from the arrogant

assumptions of false nobles.” Spirited, showy, a genuine blue-blood,

restive under marital authority, but quivering to her inmost fibres at

the slightest appeal of a refined sentiment, Margaret of France remained

obstinately faithful to these principles, finding in them the pole-star

that guided her steps throughout life. The words we last quoted were

uttered in circumstances which give them a special force, namely, in the

funeral oration of Scaevola de Sainte-Marthe, who thought he could cast

upon the princess’s tomb no sweeter flowers, none more likely to blossom

eternally. Margaret herself never lost an opportunity of emphasising with

all her force the terrible fear she had of the power of money.

Aimer l’argent,

Sinon pour s’en aider, c’est servir les idoles![136]

In regard to those who deal with humanity like brokers, and believe that

happiness is purchasable, she gives vent to passionate apostrophes worthy

of the most ardent Christian socialists:

Ilz ont plaisirs tant qu’ils en veulent prendre,

Ilz ont honneurs s’ilz y veulent prétendre,

Ilz ont des biens plus qu’il ne leur en fault.[137]

And this was precisely what men were aiming at. The military framework of

society was broken; to replace it by a financial framework would have

been considered almost criminal; and that was where the great danger lay.

To employ a comparison approved by Francis I., two cars are running the

world’s course side by side; a choice must be made between them. One is

the car of Plutus, filled with gold, lechery, vice; the other is the car

of Honour and Love, thronged about by all the virtues.[138] The choice is

clear: for its own happiness, for its own glory, the world must reject

the worship of money, trample on the power of money, and proclaim the

power of virtuous love.

Thus, little by little, the formula sought for emerges into view. A

wonderful light is thrown on the problem when it is admitted that to

be happy it is necessary to rise above material things, and establish

society upon a philosophy of love. Life and beauty, they are the true

riches! The feeblest of men, the most hopeless invalids, the vilest

outcasts, woman with her feeble body and ardent soul, are richer than a

nugget of gold, more eternal than the Alps, greater than the sea and the

vast realm of nature, for this very reason that they have in them life,

the true life, that is, consciousness of life, confidence in life, and

love of life.

And the same idea that happiness must be sought through true life, led

men to recognise the necessity of considering the ‘hygiene’ of this

life. Medicine, care and pity had been up to that time only for the ills

of the body, for the gaping, gory wounds that came under the eye; the

wounds of heart and spirit had been forgotten. To render life sumptuous

and brilliant, to fritter it away in a sort of giddy excitement or

intoxication, was the utmost of men’s achievement. The heart cannot be

bought; there is no specific for healing its wounds; they must heal

themselves.

The art will consist then, in realising as far as may be the plenitude of

life; in other words, in extracting from Christianity, which is Hope and

Charity, an aesthetic philosophy. “I am the God of the living,” said the

Master. If we combine the sayings on life scattered through the gospels

we obtain a true code of aestheticism, while the sayings on love form

the warp and woof of the doctrine. On the morrow of the Resurrection,

when the rude fishers chosen to disseminate the sacred tidings are in

utter ignorance of the event, the Master shows Himself first of all

to Love; He appears at the gates of a mysterious garden by which Mary

Magdalene is about to pass—Mary, a woman pardoned, glorified, because she

loved much, because she sinned through superabundant kindliness.

This doctrine of love had not prospered in the world, where it found

briers too deeply rooted, thorns too cruel; it had become a supernatural

and sacred thing, so sublime that it fled the world and took refuge in

the cloister, like a sickly plant in a hothouse, leaving a free field

for vice. Tenderness seemed to come only from feebleness; every form of

art seemed immoral, all love a degenerate and ill-balanced thing, and no

one realised the need goodness has of intelligence. The pettinesses of

feminine religiosity, encouraged, unhappily, by a section of the clergy,

tended to make divine love itself ineffectual and almost ridiculous. Yet

the author of the _Imitation_ has defined love as the true source of

activity:

“Nothing is there in Heaven or earth sweeter than love, nothing stronger,

broader, higher, fuller, better, or more winsome, for love is of God,

nor can it rest but in Him, above the world created. The lover runneth

and flieth, and is alive with joy; he is free, and nothing restraineth

him; he giveth all for all, hath all in all, because he resteth above all

things in the one sovereign good whence all other goodnesses proceed and

flow. He looketh not to gifts, but raiseth himself above all to look only

to the giver. Love often knoweth no limit, but its fervour carrieth it

far above measure. Love feeleth no weight, making light of toil, would

do more than it is able, pleadeth no impossibility, because it thinketh

it may and can do all. Wherefore it is strong for anything, and where

he that loveth not doth faint and fail, love doeth and achieveth many

things.”[139]

Why then had not this beautiful religion, this beautiful philosophy

become the religion and philosophy of the world? Why had they not sent

their streams of activity flowing in ever-widening channels? Men wished

to solve this problem, and restore to the world the philosophy it had

so misunderstood—to interpret love as it should be interpreted, through

impressions and sensibility, and not through the intellect. Hence

Castiglione’s saying, “God is only seen through women.”

This saying, it is clear, does not apply to all women; it has reference

to those who are worthy to exercise an active influence.

Natural obstacles oppose themselves to this mission of philosophically

raising the world to nobler ideas by the social religion of beauty. The

French are a matter-of-fact, practical, sceptical people; between the

peasant and his cattle, the lord and the peasant, there exists a solid

and after all a pleasant relationship. Further, the French are specially

hostile to ideas of an intellectual hierarchy, they lack sensibility,

the beautiful displeases and shocks them, and when a revolution gives

them what they call a moment’s freedom, they amuse themselves by defacing

as many statues as possible, destroying their cathedrals, burning their

historical monuments with all the enthusiasm of hate a personal grievance

can inspire. Likewise, in regard to love, modesty, the ideal, and all

refined and aesthetic sentiments, we experience a certain pleasure in

scouting them; when we have won any sort of diploma, that is the use we

make of it.

And yet, do what we may, lofty things alone can elevate us: on the

mountain-top we breathe a different air from that in the valley.

We must raise on heights above us eminent women who will crucify

themselves, if need be, to draw soil-stained men to them, according to

Christ’s words, “I will draw all things unto me”—women endowed with all

that glorifies—money (to scorn money is the luxury of the rich); a noble

blood clarified on stricken fields, or through intellectual wrestlings,

a spirit original and pure. Christ was at once the son of kings and the

Son of God! This is the consecration of happiness through a philosophy of

emotion and sentiment. Plato said that what was needed for the happiness

of humanity, was “philosophers who rule, or kings who philosophise.”

Do not believe it! What is wanted is kings who govern, and women who

philosophise. Men will always imagine that liberty and equality are

established by act of Parliament; philosophy is to them only a means of

livelihood. Cremonini, a famous professor, but a wit, said when he took

leave at the close of his lectures: “All that I have taught you is true

according to Aristotle, but not in an absolute sense: you might as well

believe St. Roch or St. Anthony.” Nifo[140] contradicted himself with

charming serenity, though he allowed no one else to contradict him. In

truth, how were these excellent professors of philosophy to know that,

three and a half centuries later, a Mabilleau, a Fiorentino, or a Ferri

would doggedly set themselves to unearth their unpublished lucubrations

from the dust of libraries, and throw on them the searchlight of

criticism?

Men had reached that stage of lassitude and of wisdom when one

understands perfectly how vain, how unworthy of occupying a thoughtful

man, are the vagaries of logic-chopping. There are only two vital forces:

ambition and love. Anne of France reckons four: beauty, youth, wealth,

and ambition; but these four terms are reducible to the former two. A

doctrine of love, therefore, was necessary, and it was discovered in

Plato.

Thus there were two masters in opposition, Plato and Machiavelli.

Plato is as much a poet as a philosopher, as worthy of admiration for

his impressions and intuitions as for his ideas. He believes in beauty.

It had been said that beauty was of no account, that it had no place in

the gospels, that form signified nothing except perhaps by way of symbol,

that truth was metaphysical. That error had to be dismissed. Beauty has

a real existence, and plays a supreme part in this world. God has not

disowned it, Scripture reveals Him as bestowing life bountifully, and as

taking pleasure in man as His own image. Plato in effect develops this

same theory; what is more, he sings the praises of aestheticism in one

of the finest languages ever lisped by human tongue. It was he then who

furnished the desired formula. With him, men thought only of loving their

fellows, of expelling evil passions by means of pure love. A sweet breath

of spring fanned men’s hearts; it was philosophical and Christian. Did

Luther conceive a reform as trenchant, as vital as that? Men went back to

that blessed time when, without employing the quiddities of the Sorbonne

and of German science, Heaven spoke the simple words to us: “Love one

another.” They believed they had found the secret of rejuvenescence,

of re-birth, and there were men so intoxicated that they went so far

as to ask themselves whether Charity countenanced trade or taxes. The

whole idea is summed up in a single line: power results in barbarism,

civilisation is the product of beauty.

This formula suits both strong and weak, everyone, indeed; it belongs

neither to men nor to women, hails neither from north nor from south. The

northern peoples, however, looking at Plato with a purely philosophical

and technical eye, failed to discover it; at Venice, the headquarters

of perfect editions of Plato, and at Paris, where he was acclaimed as a

prophet, an ancestor of Christianity, where Florentine commentaries on

him poured fast from the press, and where even a neglected commentary

of Ficino[141] was published, no one dreamed of seeking the recipe for

happiness in Plato’s philosophy. So greatly was he distrusted that the

Italian Vicomercati, appointed in 1542 to the professorship of philosophy

at the College of France, thought it his duty by way of returning thanks

to immolate Socrates in his inaugural lecture.

It was the Florentines, with their keen appreciation of the good things

of life, who discovered the artistic side of the platonic life. Women did

not count for nothing in their first deduction, which consisted in so

linking the objects of nature to the human personality that they should

form thenceforth nothing but one long procession of the affections. At

Florence this new religion was observed with tender and pleasing rites.

On the anniversary of Plato’s death, the master’s bust was crowned with

laurel by invited guests, and then at a magnificent banquet spread

under the pleasant shade, _laudes_ and _canzoni_ were sung in honour of

the new spirit. Almost all were poets, and Lorenzo de’ Medici chiefest

among them. They maintained a strict conformity with Christian ideas.

The young Giovanni de’ Medici, the future Leo X., who was brought up

among them, received at the age of seven valuable benefices with the

ecclesiastical tonsure, and at thirteen was given the cardinal’s hat. All

the leaders of the movement, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola,[142] Politian,

were honoured with pontifical patronage. Rome also was the centre of a

similar movement; there the academy of Pomponius Laetus[143] resuscitated

the grand days of the republic; there men breathed as at Florence an

intellectual air, light, keen and eminently free. To the _Facetiae_ of

Poggio, babbled out in a room at the Vatican before a select circle of

jovial monsignors, corresponded the joyous atrocities of Panormita, the

boon companion of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Everyone smiled, everyone

was happy: the very _bezants_ or golden pieces, the glory of the Medici

escutcheon, sparkled in the sun like flashes of their wit.

The luscious warmth of the air, shady groves, birds, gardens, statues,

antique marbles, thus played an indispensable part in the platonic

philosophy. A banquet in honour of the nine Muses served us as a map of

this new world; Marzilio Ficino, chosen by lot, chanted to the glory of

the divine character of love a superb song whose echoes were long to

resound.

Learned critics have sometimes reproached Ficino with not sticking close

enough to the text of the master, and with permitting himself outbursts

of virtuosity tinctured (so they say) with Alexandrinism. Likely enough;

Ficino was Ficino, a man, independent, enthusiastic, no fanatic; he

steered for happiness, and whatever his admiration for Socrates, he

did not imagine that that great man had necessarily said the last word

about everything, any more than he believed men eternally committed to

Corinthian capitals. His dream was of a human dwelling-house, noble,

comfortable, habitable for us all, a living shelter for life! While

pushing out glorious reconnaissances along the roads to heaven, Plato had

clearly left men’s minds undecided on some points of great importance to

their happiness, and it seemed wise to supply his deficiency by accepting

with closed eyes the explanations furnished by Christianity.

A thousand voices exclaim, like Montaigne and Charron, that the

immortality of the soul cannot be proved by sheer force of reasoning.

In any case, how long we have to wait! cries Margaret of France. For

how many centuries have some who have fallen asleep looked for their

awakening!

The Middle Ages replied to this question with their own terrible logic.

They set us on the edge of the abyss, and there told us that in this

world there is no happiness, but merely consolations; they linked us with

a supreme life lying beyond us, like those hard, emaciated, immovable

statues incorporate with the stone of cathedrals and themselves of the

same stone. We live, they told us, with another life than our own, and

love with another love; if we lose one dear to us we may cast flowers on

the vacant chair or the needless cradle, altars of true life! Platonism

prefers to take us for what we are. Not supposing that Providence sets

man upon the earth to struggle against its own blessings, the platonists

believed that in making religion more lovable they would make the world

less pagan, and that in giving it a philosophical cast they would make

it acceptable to unbelievers. Love seemed to them to be a reservoir of

life, like those noble springs which leap down in some shady nook of a

park, and flow on through a network of arteries more or less conspicuous,

to give life even to the desert. Soon we shall no longer be; the hours

of our life are sacred: what is the good of ruffling them with so many

disquietudes? It is a law of our life to yearn for Paradise, and there is

nothing to hinder us desiring it in this present world.

The study of Plato, then, was entered upon freely, with the addition

of anything that could throw light upon the doctrines which that great

man had founded—the Bible, for instance, which in the Roman world men

prided themselves on consulting directly; then Arabic and even Mussulman

philosophy, with which it was fashionable to claim acquaintance. And it

was well understood that a quest pursued with so subtle a magnificence,

in scorn of realities and brutal sensualism, demanded a keen and

eminently free intelligence, a soul at leisure, and a great loathing

of the flesh; otherwise all hope of falling under the exquisite

fascinations of love at once terrestrial and quasi-divine must be

abandoned. That explains why from the outset this philosophy addressed

itself to women and to the salons. Plato began to be talked about as we

in our day have heard Schopenhauer and other eminent thinkers talked

about by persons who have been at little pains to read them. It was known

that Plato harped on the necessity of love, that his smile was less

forbidding than that of S. Francis of Assisi, and that his method was

dialogue, so naturally dialogues and conversations became the methods

of the new platonists. From these tender colloquies the vulgar were

excluded; they could make nothing of them; one could not expect common

folk to apprehend the delicate devices by which love is etherealised and

rendered impalpable; from these they would only have got a theme for

gross perversions. Those who had the gift of knowledge and understanding

ascended the Acropolis like M. Renan, to chant their canticles in a

little temple of their own, whose dimensions seemed to them sufficient;

the aristocratic mystery replaced the old priestly mystery; so Cataneo

whispered, as it were under his breath, his book on love addressed only

to the priests and temple choristers. Bembo took great care not to

name the interlocutors male and female of the _Asolani_, “so as not to

scandalise the populace”; all were agreed in religiously respecting the

ignorance of the people, as to-day we respect the ignorance of young

girls. And for the same reason, again, they made too prodigal a use of

that strange mythological jargon which appears to us in these days so

entirely pathetic. Mythology has its aesthetic advantages; it is an

incarnation of the passions; but that would not suffice to explain its

sickening vogue in a society full of taste, scepticism and levity, if

it had not presented the one special advantage of furnishing a sort of

technical slang by which the initiated recognised one another, and which

sifted out the vulgar. The princes of wit felt so strongly the need of

such distinctions that before adopting this garb for their works they

began by muffling their own identity in an antique livery: a Greek or

Latin name served them as a uniform,[144] as when San Severino called

himself Pomponius Laetus, the old aristocratic pride yielding before

this new-fangled vanity. Artistic glory donned the conventional garb; no

one had the preposterous notion of lamenting in Raphael the exquisite

interpreter of Madonnas; what was deplored was the rival of Nature, the

painter after the antique. “Raphael has resuscitated ancient Rome,”

exclaims Castiglione, “he has recalled to life and glory that Rome of

old, that corpse devoured by sword and fire and time.” That was the

language of the courts, the ladies and the princes of the church; they

had said all when they compared Raphael to the painters of the Augustan

age (with whose works we are not very well acquainted), and when they

remembered that the new Rome was only a degenerate if not a moribund Rome.

We dwell at some length on a state of mind of such peculiarity and

complexity as this, and from which contradictory deductions were

sometimes drawn, because we find in it the only possible explanation of

the movement about to arise in France. Platonism was an impression, an

essence of free-thought, purely aesthetic, Christian in principle though

sometimes pagan in its results, warranted platonic in label and origin

though somewhat eclectic in composition; a mystic incense in the worship

of Venus, a subtle aroma floating in the air both of churches and of

theatres; breathed in assemblies in the city; dominating the effluences

of Nature under the shadow of country villas; open a book, and one caught

a breath of it; even painting and music strove to interpret it fittingly;

at the dinners and dances and in the thousand avocations of fashionable

life it filled the air; it exhaled as it were an immortal savour of

orange blossoms; this was what they called a philosophy.

The platonist spirit, as Plato understood it, was often exactly the

opposite. The women and the poets whom Plato condemned,[145] the prelates

who were the heads of Christendom, were its propagators. They were not

greatly enamoured of Plato’s somewhat socialistic theories. They went

to Plato as we go to Nice, to obtain a little sunshine and escape the

incessant din of controversy. It is a profound saying of Plato that

“those who see the absolute and eternal and immutable may be said to

know, and not to have opinion only.” That is what men desired: they would

have run after illusions and even errors if only they made for happiness.

What is the good of pursuing mutabilities? The wise man clings to that

which tranquillises. Others may wear themselves out with anxiety and

restlessness, but he enjoys his life of placid ease; in the end they die

and he dies, and there is nothing to choose between them.

Before it could be turned to profitable account, platonism thus underwent

a long and difficult preparation to bring it into line with the tastes

of the day. The work was accomplished in Italy, whence the product was

sent to us in a finished state. Good Plato, with his rather old-fashioned

eyes, had seen beauty only in man; from one man he passed to the species,

then from the species to the soul, that is, to intellectual beauty, which

to him appeared the only true beauty. It was necessary to bring this

doctrine into line with the practical doctrine of the special attraction

exercised on man by the beauty of woman. Now Plato, besides giving

man the beauty and woman the love, attributed to love the secondary

character of a sensual and egoistic phenomenon in which no spiritual

element was discoverable save perhaps the instinct of immortality. Of

this very instinct, however, Plato had an imperfect appreciation, for the

immortality we might hope to gain by replacing our decayed bodies with

the fresh young lives of our offspring, if it serves the interests of the

human race, does not much serve those of the individual; at any rate,

Plato considered it at once vulgar—everyone or nearly everyone being able

to aspire to it—and incomplete, for transmission and conservation of life

are not the same thing, and only a person very barren of intellectual

resources could content himself with so modest a glimmer of immortality.

A man only survives through his thoughts. The last shreds of the thoughts

of Homer or Hesiod will live long, and will long cause temples to spring

from the earth; what child of flesh and blood is likely to bear his

father’s glory thus on through the ages?

The earliest interpreters of Plato, Ficino and Politian, had departed

with no little timidity from his teaching; the one eclectic and cautious,

the other adventurous, they went nevertheless not much beyond formulating

a general doctrine of love. Ficino exalted love as the supreme wisdom,

the creator and preserver _par excellence_; the link binding earthly

things together, and the earth itself with heaven; the inspirer of great

deeds and noble thoughts, a necessary element of life. He preached the

love of love itself: “The man who loves, loves love above all; love is

sufficient unto itself and finds its goal within itself; it is true and

good and pure.” But in order to bring himself into conformity with the

new spirit, Ficino admitted as derived from Plato (though as a matter of

fact it is not to be found in his works)[146] a capital distinction upon

which the platonism of the Renaissance was entirely to rest: there are

two loves, different in degree, the one heaven-born and fixing its gaze

upon heaven, the other born of Jupiter and seeking only to produce a form

like him.

Francesco Cataneo insisted strongly on this invaluable distinction.

Analysing man, he found in him a mind, the source of true spiritual love,

and a sort of intermediate force hard to define, a “soul or life” whence

sensual or, if the term be preferred, profane love has its being. Cataneo

moreover dealt hardly with profane love, representing it as bare-footed

to indicate its foolishness, lean for lack of nourishment, and winged,

for it is evanescent, dependent on physical beauty, on “worthless dross”;

and it was because the world knew no other love that the preaching of

a Reformation became necessary. As to women, Cataneo never ceased to

consider them as stones of stumbling; inheriting all the old prejudices

of the schoolmen, he saw in women nothing but imperfect men created for

the sole end of perpetuating the race, and man ever seemed to him the

perfect type.

But with what warmth, with what passion Bembo, the Roman prelate and

future cardinal, expounds the modern principles before the charming

coterie of Urbino, and, flinging away the swaddling bands of early days,

confesses himself frankly a feminist![147]

“The terrestrial beauty that excites love,” he says, “is an inflowing

(_influsso_) of divine beauty irradiating all creation. It rests like a

beam of light on regular, graceful and harmonious features; it beautifies

this countenance, shining in it, attracting all eyes to it, and through

them penetrating, stirring, delighting the soul and bringing desire to

birth therein. Love is thus really born of a ray of divine beauty, caught

through the medium of a woman’s face. Unhappily the senses interpose: a

man sees in the body itself the source of beauty and longs to enjoy it.

How deceived he is! It is not beauty that is thus enjoyed; an appetite

is appeased, and soon comes satiety, weariness and often aversion. These

deceptions and regrets abundantly prove what an error has been made, for

a man must needs have found joy and restfulness if he had sought the true

end, whereas on the contrary love gives rise to a thousand ills—griefs

and torments, vexation and sullen fits, despondency, catastrophes even;

the heart never attains the limit of its desires, or perhaps the man is

so sunk in sensual love, declines so far towards the level of the beasts,

as to become incapable of comprehending the supreme radiance. All these

experiences are dearly purchased. Knowledge how to love comes only in

ripe manhood: only the old indeed really have it, and their skill lies in

eluding the impulse of the senses, in fleeing from all that is vulgar. If

he can do no otherwise, a man must set his face steadfastly towards love

divine, taking reason for his guide.”

True love, then, is a disinterested love inspired in man by woman. And

therefore Bembo, who was the more knowing in these things because he

had loved deeply, was still young, and had not yet heard his own clear

call towards love divine, lifts up his voice in a passionate prayer: “O

love, most good, most beautiful, most wise, thou that comest from divine

goodness and wisdom, and returnest thither again, O thou cord binding us

poor terrestrial and mortal folk one to another, thou bendest the higher

virtues to dominate the lower! Thou dost unite the elements, thou dost

perpetuate the life that perisheth, thou makest imperfection perfect,

thou bringest discords into harmony, thou turnest foes into friends, thou

givest fruit to the earth, peace to the waves, and to heaven its light of

life! O father of true pleasures, of grace and peace, of lowliness and

goodwill, O enemy of wildness and pride and slothfulness, thou art the

alpha and omega of all good!

“Thou dost reveal thyself in terrestrial beauty! Hear our prayers,

lighten our darkness, guide us through the mazes of this world, rectify

the falseness of our senses. Humbly we beg of thee balmy breath from the

spiritual world, a touch of celestial harmony, an inexhaustible fount

of true contentment! Purge our eyes of ignorance, and make us to see in

its perfection the beauty of on high! Love is communion with the divine

beauty, the banquet of the angels, immortal ambrosia!”

It is now time to answer an objection which the reader has no doubt

formulated long ago, and which Bembo very clearly perceived.

Assuredly it is woman’s mission among us to represent beauty, and

consequently love, and love is the inspiration of noble thoughts and

great actions. But these are such old truths that to find them hardly

needed so much intellectual and poetic effort, or the harking back to

Plato.

The learned book _On the Nature of Love_, in which Equicola essays

simply an enumeration of the different species of love known since the

thirteenth century, resembles a collection of butterflies. Every colour

is there, brilliant or dull; the sentimental view is there represented

in almost infinite shades, from the magnificent love of Boucicaut, who

served all women for the love of one, the Holy Virgin, to the art of

loving for love’s sake, always fashionable in the salons, and sedulously

cultivated as an excellent prescription for innocuous emotions and a

cheap renown. Men well knew how to love, to be sure!

But love is rarely reciprocal; as someone has said, one loves and the

other takes the kisses. So far, it was the woman who was recognised as

the beauty, and consequently as the loved one, and who took the kisses.

The novelty of Plato’s system was to transfer the beauty to men, which

ran counter to all accepted notions. To Bembo this theory seemed

intolerable. That women are capable of loving he firmly believed and

rejoiced to believe. But to give up loving women appeared to him too

cruel. He would much rather give platonism the go-by and acknowledge the

reciprocity of beauty and love. In short, he fell back on Petrarchism.

Michelangelo proclaimed the true modern platonism with extraordinary

ardour in professing a love at once virile and pure. “I have often heard

him reason and discourse on love,” writes Condivi, “and I learnt from

persons present that he spoke of it no otherwise than may be read in

Plato. I do not know what Plato says, but I know well, having long had

intimate intercourse with Michelangelo, that I never heard issue from his

mouth aught but the most becoming words, apt to repress the lawless and

unbridled desires that might spring up in the hearts of young men.”

Michelangelo said more than once that God is seen in terrestrial beauty;

love is only a hymn to the Creator; “for if every one of our affections

is displeasing to heaven, to what end would God have created the world?”

A great love makes only for the highest morality, it provides man with

wings for a sublime flight:[148]

Thy wondrous beauty, image of the grace

That fills all heaven with glory, to us shown

By the Eternal Artist’s hand alone,

When time and age have worn it from thy face,

Nor age nor time can from my heart displace,

But ever deeplier graven shall it be;

For in my thought that beauty I shall see

Which Time’s cold finger never can erase.

If the soul were not created in the image of God it would seek after

nothing but external beauty; but it does in truth penetrate beyond

this deceptive outer form, to fix itself on the essential, to rise

until it attains the ideal or universal form: _Transcende nella forma

universale_.[149] Thus beauty elevates and quickens us into the world of

spirits and the elect. Many of Michelangelo’s verses convey the same idea

under different forms:

The fount that feeds my love is not my heart,

For though I love thee, yet my love withal

Is not to heart of flesh and blood in thrall,

But ever yearneth toward a goal apart,

Where no base mortal passion dare intrude,

Nor any guilty thought nor impulse rude.

A love without heart! Here indeed is the formula of the new

platonism![150]

Unfortunately, Michelangelo is a striking and titanic exception. He can

scarcely be considered the head of a school: and platonism became for

the most part nothing more than a fashionable science, the antidote to

marriage; an intellectual union between a hard-headed, lusty-armed man

and a woman all tenderness and wisdom; the formula of the government

of man by woman. Its origin and its end remained equally philosophic;

in short, it was a sentimental sociology. If it had been a question

of philosophy, no one could better have represented Plato than

Savonarola.[151] But Savonarola did not represent the intellect of

society; behind him men thought they caught a whiff of all the wretched

tatterdemalions in revolt at Rome against the Academy of Laetus, at

Florence against the Medici. On the other hand, Tullia d’Aragona, a

courtesan, exercised a platonic influence through her excellent book _On

the Infinity of Perfect Love_. Others unceremoniously dismissed Socrates

and Plato as liars and knaves, and yet passed for good platonists since

they extolled the religion of beauty, and woman as essentially its

priestess; and since they saw in love the chain binding earth to heaven,

and the bulwark against socialism. In short, platonism and feminism are

one and the same. It is quite possible to believe implicitly in the

dogma of love without splitting love in two and pinning ourselves on an

impossible dilemma—matter without spirit or spirit without matter. This

latitude of appreciation is not to be called materialism, but merely the

need of a material perception in order to arrive at the idea of beauty.

This explains why the platonist spirit was so coldly received in France.

Platonism was the art of rendering virtue pleasant and contagious; but in

France it was the conviction that virtue needed to defend itself like the

fretful porpentine.[152]

No one troubled about spiritualising love; the inferior clergy, parish

parsons, applying in every matter a rough-and-ready system of ethics,

drew no distinction between sentiment and sensation, but proscribed

everything. They summed up the religious life in a multitude of

observances all having for result the subjection of women—a contracted

morality which gave rise to startling inconsequences. It was pretended

that the mere sight of a lady fidgeting about on her balcony was enough

to tell you she was a Frenchwoman.[153]

Anne of France forbade lovemaking between fiancés, the best, most

innocent, most legitimate in the world, just as strictly as the grossest

intrigue; but Louise of Savoy was as little shocked at the one as the

other.

There was bitter hostility between the two camps.

Madame de Taillebourg remorselessly turned her back on her nieces, Louise

of Savoy and Margaret of France, as being tainted with the new spirit.

Queen Anne personally led the crusade in favour of the old ideas; Antony

du Four, her almoner, published semi-officially a collection of the lives

of ninety-one pious women, as a counterblast to the Italian collections;

and he implored ladies not to succumb to the new contagion, not to run

out of their salutary groove, for, he said, France had never produced

“more wise and good women than at present,” beginning with Queen Anne, “a

bottomless well of virtue.” “Under the mask of science and philosophy”

all these “prating and scribbling fellows” who wished to give women a

great part to play were only seeking, declared Du Four, to sap their

modesty and wreck their good name.

In these criticisms there was certainly a modicum of truth. But they went

too far in anathemising the good and the evil without distinction.

France, like Italy, had its “primitive” women—philosophers, apostles of

the philosophy of love; but their numbers and above all their influence,

owing to the opposition we have just indicated, were very small. They

were women of admirable endowments and sterling qualities, highly

educated, afire with energy of that somewhat melancholy cast necessarily

developed by contact with a stern world. It is natural to cite, by way of

example, that sometime lady of Beaujeu, Anne of France, a figure after

Michelangelo’s own heart, grand and severe as a cathedral.

We picture her always in her capacity as regent—the politician, soldier,

and diplomate upholding the fortunes of France, and displaying in the

greatest difficulties her incomparable genius. And yet her heart was

not in this work; she filled her part as a family duty, she devoted

herself to it entirely, but it was the cross of her life. As soon as

she could she forsook her toilsome life of affairs, for no other reason

than to return to the life of the affections. She shirked neither toil

nor responsibilities, and understood perhaps more fully than anyone

else the profound and mysterious joy experienced by lofty souls in

impressing their own individuality widely upon others. But she was only

too conscious that in plying a man’s trade she was acting like a widow or

an elder sister, not like a free woman or a princess, and that neither

politics nor military service was directly conducive to happiness. She

knew that in crushing rebels she would not make them happy, and that she

herself would be the first victim of her devotion.

She was right. We know how, in the swing of the political pendulum, she

fell beneath the strokes of Louise of Savoy,[154] who owed everything to

her. Wounded in her liveliest interests, in her dearest affections, in

the sentiment of dignity she held so high, she died proudly, as Caesar

died, with her mantle wrapped about her:

Elle attendoit venir l’heure opportune

Que la justice ou Dieu y mist la main,[155]

as a servant of Francis I. wrote.

Her coldness then was assumed, but she kept up the appearance of Stoicism

so well that many a man, even among her friends and admirers, really

believed in this lamentable insensibility. Again, Anne of France had

no love for the vanities, the whole trivial round of court life; “she

dismissed Cypris to Paphos,” for which some persons found it difficult

to forgive her, particularly Octovien de Saint-Gelais, who nevertheless

has extolled her sweetness, calling her “a second Semiramis, a new Queen

of the Amazons, come to life again to establish peace.” Her vigorous

intellect, her frank and remorselessly sincere disposition, her way of

treating everything on broad and general lines, puzzled the rude yet

feeble folk around her. The only thing she lacked, as one of her friends

said, was love:

S’elle avoit un peu de cella,

Ce seroit la plus accomplye

A qui Dieu donna oncques vie.[156]

She had a large, indeed an immeasurable quantity of “that,” but she took

it seriously; it might well be said that she did not set “her whole

imagination spinning round problems of sentiment.” She had no idea of

bringing imagination into her affections, but distrusted it; it was

through the soul and the real needs of the soul that she caught glimpses

of the ideal life of which we have just spoken. But having faith in,

rather than enthusiasm for, these ideas, and considering as she did

that the heart’s activities were perfectly reasonable, beneficent and

necessary, she saw no reason for ruffling, gilding or engarlanding

them. She was somewhat lacking in suppleness, self-sacrificing, of

unbounded good-heartedness, staid in demeanour, firm in resolution,

but also warm, passionate, loving to devote herself to others and not

doing so by halves. In her heart of hearts she adored all that a good

woman adores—her son, a poor child whose death almost killed her, her

daughter, her son-in-law, whom she loved as a son; she took an ardent

delight in friendship, and above all in that special, delicate, tender,

profound affection which is only established between a man and a woman;

to win love was her sole ambition.[157] She buried deep down in her heart

an innocent romance which no historian has related and which even her

intimates appear never to have suspected—a reserve which paints her to

the life! Till the day of her death she wore a ring on her finger. We

have discovered her secret: the ring was the pledge of her betrothal to

a young duke of Calabria from whom her father had separated her, who had

soon afterwards died, but whom she was never able to forget.

This certainly was one of the women most likely to understand and to

promulgate throughout France the programme of the quest for happiness.

She did not believe with Du Four that a sort of passive naïveté was

the ultimate expression of virtue; she sought another goal, anxious,

doubtless, that love should give a powerful stimulus to woman’s

activities, as it had done for the women of Spain, whose imagination was

filled with Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. Her friend Champier has rounded

off her thought by recalling Plato’s saying that “the lover is dead to

himself and lives in another.” Deeply read in the church fathers and the

philosophers, she hailed with joy the principle of platonic love, “the

love of which the philosopher speaks, that is, a love founded on purity.”

For all her lofty station, however, Anne of France never found herself

able to popularise her ideas in a country where an idea only succeeds

when it becomes a fashion; the new philosophy had perforce to come like

a flood, sweeping good and evil along with it, and imposing itself by

the authority of the court. That is what happened around Francis I.; as

soon as it became a mark of good taste to talk philosophy and occult

sciences,[158] Hellenism,[159] and above all Italianism, and to adopt

ultramontane fashions wholesale, people chattered about Plato. The king

dearly loved the ladies, and could not despise anything that glorified

the sex. He set some store by “Noble-Heart,” “Feminine Noblesse,”[160]

and other subtle evocations of the old chivalry; he hoped that platonism

might succeed in renewing them, and requested Castiglione, the oracle of

the new school, to furnish a pendant to his _Courtier_, to be called

“The Courtesan.” Castiglione declined this flattering invitation.

When Francis I. ascended the throne it was as a member of a sort of

triumvirate, the other two being ladies—“a single heart in three bodies.”

Louise of Savoy, aged and old-fashioned, reserved politics as her

sphere, as far as possible; Francis retained the pageantry, the money,

the passages at arms, the material satisfactions of power; Margaret of

France, in the Italian style, assumed the direction of men’s minds and

souls; she was far more queen of intellectual France than Duchess of

Alençon or Queen of Navarre.

She so completely identified herself with her brother as avowedly to

borrow from him her whole status, and particularly her name. People

have called her by the most various names without really understanding

why, owing to the fact that she usually adopted her brother’s name,

which frequently changed. As sister of the count of Angoulême she called

herself Margaret of Angoulême; under Louis XII., as sister of the Duke of

Valois and the heir to the throne, she called herself Margaret of Valois

or of Orleans; as sister of the king she became Margaret of France, her

definitive name, under which she accomplished her mission.

For thirty years she presided thus over an amazing intellectual movement;

the whole thinking soul of France hung upon her smile. She was the

incarnation of platonism.

In one of the galleries of Chantilly, that sanctuary of the Renaissance,

her grand face, with its long, severe, clean-cut, distinguished features,

somewhat hard as though chiselled out of alabaster, continually smiles

upon us and encourages us. Her eyes are clear and full of fire; her

mouth is fine, intellectual, with something of irony, of benevolence

and of reserve; something at once yielding and defensive, acerbated

and enthusiastic, a singular sibylline countenance, the enigma of a

spiritual governance—the rule of mind and heart; a woman to the core,

attractive and wishing to attract, but two personalities in one, each

interpenetrating the other, concealing her real self within two or three

inner entrenchments after the old feudal tactics, like St. Theresa in her

“fortresses of the soul.”

She reigned with undivided sway, with all the powers of her affection,

with her infinite womanly delicacy, with triumphant skill.

She was in very truth a woman of fire, this woman who wrote to her

brother while a prisoner in Spain: “Whatever may be required of me,

though it be to fling to the winds the ashes of my bones to do you

service, nought will be strange, or difficult, or painful to me, but

solace, ease of mind, honour.”

And she was loved; men never tired of praising her. Her name became a

household word, and lives on even in our own day in charming books, like

that devoted to her by a lady of rare genius, chosen by Nature to revive

the traditions of woman’s influence—the Countess d’Haussonville. And

yet we are always wondering what is behind that smiling countenance at

Chantilly.

Margaret is doubly complex, first as a woman, and then as a typical woman

of the sixteenth century. She is essentially a woman of her period, and

that is why she cannot but interest us. Her thoughts, somewhat hazy,

and sometimes wrapped in rather odd garbs, are difficult to co-ordinate

because, unlike those of Anne of France, they have no spontaneity or

originality. Almost all of them are derived from without. Her lovable

mind is like a mountain peak of fair height, with nothing rugged or

bleak about it: it promises no sublime effects, no Pisgah sights; it

pleases and interests us precisely because we can reach its summit by

an easy road, for which many of us are grateful. Is not that better for

poor tired folk than lofty masculine heights profitless and perilous to

scale? It springs gently from the landscape, like the pleasant mountains

in the heart of France, and while enabling us to take observation of

the sky, keeps in touch with the earth, and from this standpoint we

can contemplate, spread out like a map, a smiling country and highly

decorative craters. It is the “Belvedere” _par excellence_. Nowhere could

we judge her period better than from the vantage ground of her mind.

But it is very clear that it would be a mistake persistently to look for

in her the peaks and abysses she does not possess. It has been proved

to demonstration that, given certain circumstances—if, for example, he

had only been killed at the siege of Toulon—Napoleon would have died a

captain of artillery; and doubtless Margaret of France, but for the

accession of her brother, the wave of feminine Italianism, and possibly

many other circumstances, would have died wife of the Duke of Alençon

or the King of Navarre, or even less. Yet we can realise better than

ever to-day how vastly important her leadership was. Her generation was

that from which we are sprung, to which we owe our blood and sinews.

Our society is experiencing almost the same uncertainties and the same

attacks; it needs intelligent and active women as much as ever. Margaret

was less bent on being an exceptional woman than on fulfilling her part

as first lady of France. She played her part very well; she had her

Pléiade.[161] And at her side she brought up as her successor another

Margaret, her niece, the future Duchess of Berry and of Savoy, who did in

fact continue the tradition—not less amiable, not less distinguished, but

coming later and consequently more charming still, and above all, more

calm and self-contained.

Margaret of France had never read Plato until towards the end of her

life, and then, when she discovered him, she believed she had found

her guiding star. On the other hand, she did not permit Boccaccio to

be forgotten. Her philosophy, then, was not very psychological, but

it was eminently social. The theories of Bembo seemed to her to endow

women with a large and beneficent measure of power; and that was enough.

It must be confessed, however, that she looked at social questions

themselves from a somewhat superior standpoint, and with a necessarily

discriminating favour. She knew but one person, her brother, who even in

the most manifest errors appeared to her the ideal of perfection, “the

true Christ.” Apart from him she loved none but God, and she adopted as

her emblem a marigold turned towards the sun, indicating her purpose to

live and breathe only “for high, celestial and spiritual things”; other

things, husbands included, seemed to her paltry and mean. And thus, as a

woman of intelligence, she hoped to reign through the affections; her

most assiduous flatterers only extolled her heart; even after her death a

pious respect continued to watch over her works, of which a selection was

published. And yet she gave only her intelligence to the world.

Her theory of love is peculiar enough. Love of course appears to her the

corner-stone of the social edifice: in itself it is always good, only

becoming bad by the use made of it. Margaret is eminently platonist in

the sense that she proclaims the existence of two loves, a good and a

bad; but to her the distinction between them is simplicity itself: the

one is man’s love, the other, woman’s; men love with an evil, earthly

love, women alone can love celestially. Sometimes they chance to allow

themselves to be caught in the snares of men; let them flee then, for

“briefest follies are always the best.” Thus loving is for women. The

love of a woman, established firmly in God and on honour, the same love

that Henri d’Albret styles “hypocrisy or covert malice,” forges a divine

and holy chain. Margaret never tires of expatiating on the virtues of

women’s love, a pure and ardent love, the instrument and the end of

civilisation, the highest form of human activity, the prayer admirable

beyond all other prayers that a living creature can address to the

Creator. In the nineteenth tale of the _Heptameron_ she gives this love a

very catholic definition, borrowed almost word for word from Castiglione:

“I call perfect lovers those who seek some perfection, either goodness,

beauty or grace, in the object of their love, those who incline always

to virtue and have so lofty and refined a heart that, even at the price

of death, they would not aim at base things that honour and conscience

condemn. The soul was created but to return to the supreme good, and

so long as it is encased in the body, it can only long and strive for

holiness. But the sin of our first parent has rendered dark and sensual

the senses, the soul’s inevitable intermediary; seeing only through them

the visible objects which approach perfection, the soul hastens to find

in outward beauty, in visible grace and the moral virtues, the sovereign

beauty, grace, and virtue. It seeks them, and finds them not, and passes

by; it essays to mount higher, like children who, as they grow bigger,

must needs change their dolls. And when at length mature experience

shows that neither perfection nor felicity is to be met with in this

world, the soul pants after the great Author and the very source of the

beautiful. But then may God open its eyes! otherwise it must speedily

stray into the paths of false philosophy. For faith alone can reveal and

bestow what is good, which carnal, natural man by himself never could

attain.”

Thus the worship of beauty is not necessarily mystical, but it is a true

religion. We come from God, and we return to God through hope and love

much more surely than through any sort of reasoning. The holy love of the

beautiful, of perfection, purifies the soul better than any practical

efforts, and little by little raises it to the ideal perception of

perfect beauty. The soul then wings its flight towards God, sustained by

faith above unfathomable abysses.

And so it is necessary to proclaim happiness, peace, gentleness, joy to

men of good will, and even to others, if they are to be lifted above

themselves, their ambitions, their hatreds, their coarsenesses. What

a mistake it is to preach a religion of terror to poor creatures too

wretched as it is!

Oh, que je voy d’erreur la teste ceindre

A ce Dante, qui nous vient icy peindre

Son triste Enfer et vieille Passion.[162]

Let women learn their duty!

They are priestesses in the religion of Beauty.

They must win love, they must themselves love! They must be balm poured

upon aching wounds, the beauty that soothes, the love that accomplishes

a new Passion, taking upon itself all the sorrows of others. Of old, a

great noble had been recognised by his knowing how to give, and by his

giving, not of his superfluity, but a portion of himself—his blood to

his country, his strong arm or his affection to his brethren. It only

remained to feminise and spiritualise this superb tradition. Women

will give their hearts, in other words, they will diffuse happiness,

fellowship in the supreme life, life itself! “Love is that which really

makes a man, and without which he is nought.”

Life! Alas! at this word Margaret shudders. She longs to penetrate the

great secret of our destiny. She stoops over one of her gentlewomen

lying at the point of death, to see if she can catch the passing of her

soul! She receives a lover at the tomb of the lady he came to meet,

and with a tragic gesture cries “She is there!” She loves and preaches

nothing but life. She knows that death is inevitable, but hopes that this

accident may come to her without lingering in long “suburbs,” and she

casts herself with confidence upon the God of platonism whom she believes

in, whom she feels to be all love. From terrestrial love she expects to

escape at one bound into the arms of the other, the Great Love; “from

the felicity which alone in this world can be called felicity, to fly

suddenly to that which is eternal.”[163] And thus in her eyes man’s

natural end is enfolded in love and hope resting on faith. There, in the

heart of the villages, covered with moss and honeysuckle, are the humble

tombs, the sacred shelter of those we have loved, clothed all about with

life hard by the radiant crucifix! A sunbeam floods them in light, like a

stream of love from on high. The same ray penetrates our hearts, telling

us that all is not ended, and that a little joy is still blossoming upon

this spot of earth. Let us leave God to count the flying moments—leave it

to Him in full confidence and peace!

Like all human things, platonism cannot attain perfection; it necessarily

has little to say in regard to man’s birth and death. To complete

the reformation it would perhaps be necessary, as Goethe suggests

in the second part of _Faust_, to discover a means of manufacturing

_homunculus_, in other words, of effecting human reproduction in some

other way than the old; moreover, instead of being allowed to die,

men might comfortably be translated to other worlds. But, meanwhile,

platonism is the philosophy of the living, and in truth it is remarkable

to see a secular movement basing itself on such lofty systems, and

turning to such noble account, intellectually, morally and religiously,

the natural desire which the world always has of amusing itself.

A strange generation was arising. Between 1483 and 1515 Luther, Calvin

and St. Ignatius, Rabelais and St. Theresa, were born pell-mell. And

yet, thanks to this philosophy, everyone wore the livery of happiness.

Dagger and poison hid themselves in the shade. Never were the most

agitating problems more cheerfully discussed. Yes; women know the real

value of the visionary and the immaterial, of something higher than

hoards of mere gold and silver—the value of the riches of the soul. The

Latin world was at this moment becoming a vast workshop of beauty, the

real worker being no longer the digger or the merchant, the mason or

the hodman, but whatever man lived a life of thought and love. There

was extension and broadening out in all directions; material barriers

were being overthrown; the religion of Beauty was bringing nations

as well as individuals together. And the women, the ministers of the

affections, had for their mission to watch, to judge, to temper, to

develop the faculties of men. They thought it a beautiful mission. Can

we wonder at it? They burned with the ardour of paladins; they fancied

themselves knights-errant, and displayed devices—_Non inferiora secutus_,

a masculine hemistich which men had relinquished, but which Margaret of

France resumed, to show that she bore high her white petals and her heart

of gold: “Love and Faith,” in other words, “Women and God,” the motto of

Madame de Lorraine—a motto full of joy and charm, for if men love because

they believe, and believe because they love, life becomes an unalloyed

delight.

Between mysticism and debauchery a middle term had been found, namely,

love.

When women know how to attach men to them by means of pure love, all

individual forces gain vigour, a nation flourishes, and the people are at

peace.

That, at any rate, was the new conviction.