CHAPTER XV.

CARICATURES OF WOMEN AND MATRIMONY.

Observe this picture of man's scorn of woman, drawn by Gavarni, the most noted of French caricaturists. I place it first, because it expresses the feeling toward "the subject sex" which satiric art has oftenest exhibited, and because it was executed by the person who excelled all others in delineating what he called the _fourberies de femmes_. Such, in all time, has been the habitual tone of self-indulgent men toward their victims. Gavarni well represents men in this sorry business of reviling women; for in all the old civilizations men in general have done precisely what Gavarni did recently in Paris--first degraded women, then laughed at them.

The reader, perhaps, after witnessing some of the French plays and comic operas with which we have been favored in recent years--such as "Frou-Frou," "The Sphinx," "Alixe," and others--may have turned in wild amazement to some friend familiar with Paris from long residence, and asked, Is there _any_ truth in this picture? Are there _any_ people in France who behave and live as these people on the stage behave and live? Many there can not be; for no community could exist half a generation if the majority lived so. But are there any? The correct answer to this question was probably given the other evening by a person accustomed to Paris life: "Yes, there are some; they are the people who write such stuff as this. As for the _bal masqué_, and things of that kind, it is a mere business, the simple object of which is to beguile and despoil the verdant of every land who go to Paris in quest of pleasure." French plays and novels we know do most ludicrously misrepresent the people of other countries. What, for example, can be less like truth than that solemn donkey of a Scotch duke in M. Octave Feuillet's play of "The Sphinx?" The dukes of Scotland are not so numerous nor so unconspicuous a body of men that they can not be known to a curious inquirer, and it is safe to assert that, whatever their faults may be, there is not among them a creature so unspeakably absurd as the _viveur infernal_ of this play. If the author is so far astray with his Scotch duke, he is perhaps not so very much nearer the truth with his French marquis, a personage equally foreign to his experience.

We had in New York some years ago a dozen or two of young fellows, more or less connected with the press, most of them of foreign origin, who cherished the delusion that eating a bad supper in a cellar late at night, and uttering or singing semi-drunken nonsense, was an exceedingly noble, high-spirited, and literary way of consuming a weakly constitution and a small salary. They thought they were doing something in the manner of Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb. Any one who should have judged New York in the year 1855 by the writings of these young gentlemen would have supposed that we were wholly given up to silly, vulgar, and reckless dissipation. But, in truth, the "Bohemians," as they were proud to be styled, were both few and insignificant; their morning scribblings expressed nothing but the looseness of their own lives, and that was half pretense.

Two admiring friends have written the life of Gavarni, the incomparable caricaturist of _la femme_; and they tell us just how and where and when the artist acquired his "subtle and profound knowledge" of the sex. It is but too plain that he knew but one class of women, the class that lives by deluding fools. "During all one year, 1835," say these admiring biographers, "it seems that in the life, the days, the thoughts of Gavarni, there was nothing but _la femme_. According to his own expression, woman was his 'grand affair.'" He was in love, then? By no means. Our admiring authors proceed to describe this year of devotion to _la femme_ as a period when "intrigues were mingled together, crossed and entangled with one another; when passing inclinations, the fancies of an evening, started into being together with new passions; when rendezvous pressed upon rendezvous; when there fell upon Gavarni a rain of perfumed notes from the loves of yesterday, from the forgotten loves of last month, which he inclosed in one envelope, as he said, 'like dead friends in the same coffin.'"[24]

[Footnote 24: "Gavarni, l'Homme et l'Oeuvre," par Edmond et Jules de Goncourt, Paris, 1873.]

The authors enlarge upon this congenial theme, describing their hero as going forth upon _le pavé de_ Paris in quest of _la femme_ as a keen hunter takes to the forest for the plump partridge or the bounding deer. Some he brought down with the resistless magnetism of his eye. "It was for him a veritable rapture, as well as the exertion of a power which he loved to try, to magnetize with his eye and make his own the first woman whom he chanced to meet in the throng." The substance of the chapter is that Gavarni, casting aside all the restraints of civilization and decency, lived in Paris the life of a low and dirty animal; and when, in consequence of so living, he found himself in Clichy for debt, he replenished his purse by delineating, as the _fourberies de femmes_, the tricks of the dissolute women who had got his money. That, at least, is the blunt American of our authors' dainty and elegant French.

"A monkey, a magpie, and wife Is the true emblem of strife." _Old English Tavern Sign._

[Footnote 25: "From History of Sign-boards," by Larwood and Hotten.]]

In the records of the past, we find men speaking lightly of women whose laws and usages concede least to women.

The oldest thing accessible to us in these modern cities is the Saturday-morning service in an unreformed Jewish synagogue, some of the observances of which date back beyond the historic period. But there is nothing in it older than the sentiment expressed by the men when they thank God for his goodness in not making them women. Only men are admitted to the synagogue as equal worshipers, the women being consigned to the gallery, spectators of their husbands' devotion. The old Jewish liturgy does not recognize their presence.

Older than the Jewish liturgy are the sacred books of the Hindoos. The famous passage of the "Padma Parana," translated by the Abbé Dubois,[27] has been part of the domestic code of the Hindoos for thousands of years. According to the Hindoo lawgiver, a woman has no god on earth but her husband, and no religion except to gratify, obey, and serve him. Let her husband be crooked, old, infirm, offensive; let him be irascible, irregular, a drunkard, a gambler, a debauchee; let him be reckless of his domestic affairs, as if possessed by a devil; though he live in the world without honor; though he be deaf or blind, and wholly weighed down by crime and infirmity--still shall his wife regard him as her god. With all her might shall she serve him, in all things obey him, see no defects in his character, and give him no cause of uneasiness. Nay, more: in every stage of her existence woman lives but to obey--at first her parents, next her husband and _his_ parents, and in her old age she must be ruled by her children. Never during her whole life can she be under her own control.

[Footnote 27: "Description of the Character, Manners, and Customs of the People of India," vol. i., p. 316, by J. A. Dubois, London, 1817.]

These are the general principles upon which the life of women in India is to be conducted. The Hindoo writer was considerate enough to add a few particulars: "If her husband laughs, she ought to laugh; if he weeps, she ought to weep; if he is disposed to speak, she ought not to join in the conversation. Thus is the goodness of her nature displayed. What woman would eat till her husband has first had his fill? If he abstains, she will surely fast also; if he is sad, will she not be sorrowful? and if he is gay, will she not leap for joy? In the absence of her husband her raiment will be mean." Such has been the conception of woman's duty to man by all the half-developed races from time immemorial, and such to this day are the tacit demand and expectation of the brutalized males of the more advanced races. Gavarni, married, would have been content with no subservience much short of that.

Happily, nature has given to woman the means of a fell revenge, for she usually holds the peace of the household and the happiness of all its members in her hands. The satirical works that come to us from the Oriental lands teem with evidence that women have always known how to get a fair share of domestic authority. If they are slaves, they have ever been adepts in the arts and devices of slaves. The very squaws of our Indians often contrive to rule their brawny lords. Is not the whole history of the war between the sexes included in the little story of the manner in which Pocahontas was entrapped on board a British vessel lying in the James River two hundred and fifty years ago? The captain had promised to the aunt of this dusky princess the gift of a copper kettle if she would bring her niece to the ship; and accordingly one afternoon, when she found herself on the river-bank with her husband and Pocahontas, she was suddenly seized with a longing to go on board, saying that this was the third time the ship had been in their river, and yet she had never visited it. Her grumpy old husband refusing, _she began to cry_, and then, Pocahontas joining her entreaties, of course the old man had to unfasten his canoe and paddle them off to the vessel. This model couple returned to the shore poorer by a niece of uncertain character, and richer by the inestimable treasure of a copper kettle. What fine lady could have managed this delicate affair better? Is it not thus that tickets, trinkets, and dresses are won every day in the cities of the modern world?

An attentive study of the Greek and Roman literatures furnishes many illustrations of the remark just made, that men who degrade women deride them. Among the Greeks, who kept women in subjection and seclusion, and gave them no freedom of choice in matters of dearest concern to them, the foibles of the sex were treated very much as they now are by the dissolute caricaturists of Paris. Aristophanes's mode of representing the women of Athens is eminently Gavarnian; and nothing was more natural than that an Aristophanes should come after an Anacreon. The lyric poet depicts women as objects of desire, superior in alluring charm even to wine, rosy wine; and Aristophanes delights to exhibit the women's apartment of an Athenian house as a riotous and sensualized harem. How many expressions of utter distrust and dislike of women occur in the Greek poets!

"For this, and only this, I'll trust a woman, That if you take life from her she will die; And, being dead, will come to life no more. In all things else I am an infidel."

Thus Antiphanes, who died twenty-two hundred years before Gavarni was born. Menander justifies the gods for tormenting Prometheus, though his crime was only stealing a spark of fire.

"But, O ye gods, how infinite the mischief! That little spark gave being to a woman, And let in a new race of plagues to curse us."

The well-known epigram of Palladas upon marriage expresses a thought which has been uttered by satirists in every form of which language is capable:

"In marriage are two happy things allowed-- A wife in wedding garb and in her shroud. Who, then, dares say that state can be accurst Where the last day's as happy as the first?"

Many others will occur to the reader who is familiar with the lighter utterances of the ancients. But in Greece, as in China, India, and Japan, and wherever else men and women have been joined in wedlock, there have been marriages in which husband and wife have lived on terms nobler than those contemplated by the law or demanded by usage. Where could we find a juster view of the duties of husband and wife than in that passage of Xenophon's dialogue on Economy where Ischomachus tells Socrates how he had taken his young wife into his confidence, and come to a clear understanding with her as to the share each should take in carrying on the household? Goethe must have had this passage in his mind when he wrote the fine tribute to the dignity of housekeeping in "Wilhelm Meister." Ischomachus had married a girl of fifteen, who came to him as wives in Greece usually came to their husbands--an absolute stranger to him. He had to get acquainted with her after marriage, as, indeed, he says, "When we were well enough acquainted, and were so familiar that we began to converse freely with one another, I asked her why she thought I had taken her for my wife." Much is revealed in that sentence. He tells her that, being married, they are now to have all things in common, and each should only strive to enhance the good of the household. She stares with wonder. Her mother had told her that her fortune would be wholly her husband's, and all that she had to do was to live virtuously and soberly. Ischomachus assents, but he proceeds to show her that, in the nature of things, husband and wife must be equal co-operators, he getting the money, she administering it; he fighting the battle of life out-of-doors, she within the house. At great length this model husband illustrates his point, and entirely in the spirit of the noble passage in Goethe. She catches the idea at length. "It will be of little avail," she says, "my keeping at home unless you send such provisions as are necessary." "True," he replies, "and of very little use my providing would be if there were no one at home to take care of what I send; it would be pouring water into a sieve."

This fine presentation of household economy, like that of the German poet, is, unhappily, only a dialogue of fiction. It was merely Xenophon's conception of the manner in which a philosopher of prodigious wisdom _might_ deal with a girl of fifteen, whom he had married without having enjoyed the pleasure of a previous acquaintance with her. Doubtless there was here and there in ancient Greece a couple who succeeded in approximating Xenophon's ideal.

Among the Romans women began to acquire those legal "rights" to which they owe whatever advance they have ever made toward a just equality with men. It was Roman law that lifted a wife from the condition of a cherished slave to a status something higher than that of daughter. But there was still one fatal defect in her position--her husband could divorce her, but she could not divorce him. Cicero, the flower of Roman culture, put away the wife of his youth after living with her thirty years, and no remonstrance on her part would have availed against his decision. But a Roman wife _had_ rights. She could not be deprived of her property, and the law threw round her and her children a system of safeguards which gave her a position and an influence not unlike those of the "lady of the house" at the present time. Instead of being secluded in a kind of harem, as among the Greeks, she came forward to receive her husband's guests, shared some of their festivities, governed the household, superintended the education of her children, and enjoyed her ample share of the honor which he inherited or won. "Where you are Caius, I am Caia," she modestly said, as she entered for the first time her husband's abode. He was paterfamilias, she materfamilias; and the rooms assigned to her peculiar use were, as with us, the best in the house.

To the Roman law women are infinitely indebted. Among the few hundreds of families who did actually share the civilization of Cicero, the Plinys, and Marcus Aurelius, the position of a Roman matron was one of high dignity and influence, and accordingly the general tone of the best Roman literature toward woman is such as does honor to both sexes. She was even instructed in that literature. In such a family as that of Cicero, the daughter would usually have the same tutors as the son, and the wife of such a man would familiarly use her husband's library. Juvenal, that peerless reviler of women, the Gavarni of poets, deplores the fact:

"But of all plagues the greatest is untold-- The book-learned wife in Greek and Latin bold; The critic dame who at her table sits, Homer and Virgil quotes, and weighs their wits, And pities Dido's agonizing fits. She has so far the ascendant of the board, The prating pedant puts not in one word; The man of law is nonplused in his suit; Nay, every other female tongue is mute."

The whole of this sixth satire of Juvenal, in which the Gavarnian literature of all nations was anticipated and exhausted, is a tribute to woman's social importance in Rome. No Greek would have considered woman worthy of so elaborate an effort. And as in Athens, Anacreon, the poet of sensual love, was naturally followed by Aristophanes, a satirist of women, so, in Rome, Ovid's "Art of Love" preceded and will forever explain Juvenal's sixth satire. All illustrates the truth that sensualized men necessarily undervalue and laugh at women. In all probability, Juvenal's satire was a caricature as gross and groundless as the pictures of Gavarni. The instinct of the satirist is first to select for treatment the exceptional instance of folly, and then to exaggerate that exceptional instance to the uttermost. Unhappily many readers are only too much inclined to accept this exaggerated exception as if it were a representative fact. There is a passage in Terence in which he expresses the feeling of most men who have been plagued, justly or unjustly, by a woman:

"Not one but has the sex so strong within her, She differs nothing from the rest. Step-mothers All hate their step-daughters, and every wife Studies alike to contradict her husband, The same perverseness running through them all."

The acute reader, on turning to the play of the "Mother-in-law," from which these lines are taken, will not be surprised to learn that the women in the comedy are in the right, and the men grossly in fault.

The literature of the Middle Ages tells the same story. The popular tales of that period exhibit women as equally seductive and malevolent, silly, vain, not to be trusted, enchanting to the lover, a torment to the husband. Caricatures of women and their extravagances in costume and behavior occur in manuscripts as far back as A.D. 1150, and those extravagances may serve to console men of the present time by their enormity. Many specimens could be given, but they are generally too formless or extravagant to be interesting. There are also many rude pictures from those centuries which aimed to satirize the more active foibles of the sex. One of these exhibits a wife belaboring her husband with a broom, another pounding hers with a ladle, another with a more terrible instrument, her withering tongue, and another with the surest weapon in all the female armory--tears. In the Rouen Cathedral there are a pair of carvings, one representing a fierce struggle between husband and wife for the possession of a garment the wearing of which is supposed to be a sign of mastery, and the other exhibiting the victorious wife in the act of putting that garment on. On the portal of a church at Ploërmel, in France, there is a well-cut representation of a young girl leading an elderly man by the nose. More violent contests are frequently portrayed, and even fierce battles with bellows and pokers, stirring incidents in the "eternal war between man and woman."

The gentle German priest who wrote the moral ditties of the "Ship of Fools" ought not to have known much of the tribulations of husbands; but in his poem on the "Wrath and great Lewdnes of Wymen," he becomes a kind of frantic Caudle, and lays about him with remarkable vigor. He calls upon the "Kinge most glorious of heaven and erth" to deliver mankind from the venomous and cruel tongues of froward women. One chiding woman, he observes, "maketh greater yell than a hundred magpies in one cage;" and let her husband do what he will, he can not quiet her till "she hath chid her fill." No beast on earth is so capable of furious hate--not the bear, nor the wolf, nor the lion, nor the lioness; no, nor the cruel tigress robbed of her whelps, rushing wildly about, tearing and gnawing stock and tree.

"A wrathfull woman is yet more mad than she. Cruell Medea doth us example shewe Of woman's furour, great wrath and cruelty; Which her owne children dyd all to pecis hewe."

This poet, usually so moderate and mild in his satire of human folly, is transported with rage in contemplating the faults of women, and holds them up to the abhorrence of his readers. A woman, he remarks, can wallow in wicked delights, and then, _giving her mouth a hurried wipe_, come forward with tranquil mind and an air of child-like innocence, sweetly protesting that she has done nothing wrong. The most virulent woman-hater that was ever jilted or rejected could not go beyond the bachelor priest who penned this infuriate diatribe upon the sex.

Nor was Erasmus's estimate of women more favorable than Brandt's, though he expresses it more lightly and gayly, as his manner was. And curious it is to note that the foibles which he selects for animadversion are precisely those which form the staple of satire against women at the present time. In one of his Colloquies he describes the "Assembly of Women, or the Female Parliament," and reports at length the speech of one of the principal members, the wise Cornelia. This eloquent lady heartily berates the wives of tradesmen for presuming to copy the fashions of the rich and noble. Would any one believe that the following sentences were written nearly four hundred years ago?

"'Tis almost impossible by the outside," says Cornelia to her parliament of fine ladies, "to know a duchess from a kitchen-wench. All the ancient bounds of modesty have been so impudently transgressed, that every one wears what apparel seems best in her own eyes. At church and at the play-house, in city and country, you may see a thousand women of indifferent if not sordid extraction swaggering it abroad in silks and velvets, in damask and brocard, in gold and silver, in ermines and sable tippets, while their husbands perhaps are stitching Grub-street pamphlets or cobbling shoes at home. Their fingers are loaded with diamonds and rubies, for Turkey stones are nowadays despised even by chimney-sweepers' wives. It was thought enough for your ordinary women in the last age that they were allowed the mighty privilege to wear a silk girdle, and to set off the borders of their woolen petticoats with an edging of silk. But now--and I can hardly forbear weeping at the thoughts of it--this worshipful custom is quite out-of-doors. If your tallow-chandlers', vintners', and other tradesmen's wives flaunt it in a chariot and four, what shall your marchionesses or countesses do, I wonder? And if a country squire's spouse will have a train after her full fifteen ells long, pray what shift must a princess make to distinguish herself? What makes this ten times worse than otherwise it would be, we are never constant to one dress, but are as fickle and uncertain as weathercocks--or the men that preach under them. Formerly our head-tire was stretched out upon wires and mounted upon barbers' poles, women of condition thinking to distinguish themselves from the ordinary sort by this dress. Nay, to make the difference still more visible, they wore caps of ermine powdered. But they were mistaken in their politics, for the cits soon got them. Then they trumpt up another mode, and black quoiss came into play. But the ladies within Ludgate not only aped them in this fashion, but added thereto a gold embroidery and jewels. Formerly the court dames took a great deal of pains in combing up their hair from their foreheads and temples to make a tower; but they were soon weary of that, for it was not long before this fashion too was got into Cheapside. After this they let their hair fall loose about their foreheads; but the city gossips soon followed them in that."

And this game, we may add, has been kept up from that day to this; nor does either party yet show any inclination to retire from the contest.

Erasmus was, indeed, an unmerciful satirist of women. In his "Praise of Folly" he returns to the charge again and again. "That which made Plato doubt under what genus to rank woman, whether among brutes or rational creatures, was only meant to denote the extreme stupidness and folly of that sex, a sex so unalterably simple, that for any of them to thrust forward and reach at the name of wise is but to make themselves the more remarkable fools, such an endeavor being but a swimming against the stream, nay, the turning the course of nature, the bare attempting whereof is as extravagant as the effecting of it is impossible: for as it is a trite proverb, _That an ape will be an ape, though clad in purple_; so a woman will be a woman, _i. e._, a fool, whatever disguise she takes up." And again: "Good God! what frequent divorces, or worse mischief, would oft sadly happen, except man and wife were so discreet as to pass over light occasions of quarrel with laughing, jesting, dissembling, and such like playing the fool? Nay, how few matches would go forward, if the hasty lover did but first know how many little tricks of lust and wantonness (and perhaps more gross failings) his coy and seemingly bashful mistress had oft before been guilty of? And how fewer marriages, when consummated, would continue happy, if the husband were not either sottishly insensible of, or did not purposely wink at and pass over, the lightness and forwardness of his good-natured wife?"

The ill opinion entertained of women by men during the ages of darkness and superstition found expression in laws as well as in literature. The age of chivalry! Investigators who have studied that vaunted period in the court records and law-books tell us that respect for women is a thing of which those records show no trace. In the age of chivalry the widow and the fatherless were regarded by lords, knights, and "parsons" as legitimate objects of plunder; and woe to the widow who prosecuted the murderers of her husband or the ravagers of her estate! The homage which the law paid to women consisted in burning them alive for offenses which brought upon men the painless death of hanging. We moderns read with puzzled incredulity such a story as that of Godiva, doubtful if so vast an outrage could ever have been committed in a community not entirely savage. Let the reader immerse himself for only a few months in the material of which the history of the Middle Ages must be composed, if it shall ever be truly written, and the tale of Godiva will seem credible and natural. She was her lord's chattel; and probably the people of her day who heard the story commended _him_ for lightening the burdens of Coventry on such easy terms, and saw no great hardship in the task assigned to her.

People read with surprise of Thomas Jefferson's antipathy to the poems and novels of Sir Walter Scott. He objected to them because they gave a view of the past ages utterly at variance with the truth as revealed in the authentic records, which he had studied from his youth up.

Coming down to recent times, we still find the current anecdote and proverb in all lands bearing hardly upon the sex. A few kindly and appreciative sayings pass current in Scotland; and the literatures of Germany, England, and the United States teem with the noblest and tenderest homage to the excellence of women. But most of these belong to the literature of this century, and bear the names of men who may be said to have created the moral feeling of the present moment. It is interesting to notice that in one of our latest and best dictionaries of quotation, that of Mr. M. M. Ballou, of Boston, there are one hundred and eleven short passages relating to women, of which only one is dishonorable to them, and that dates back a century and a half, to the halcyon day of the British libertine--"Every woman is at heart a rake.--POPE." So thought all the dissolute men of Pope's circle, as we know from their conversation and letters. So thought the Duc de Rochefoucauld, who said, "There are few virtuous women who are not weary of their profession;" and "Most virtuous women, like concealed treasures, are secure because nobody seeks after them." So thought Chesterfield, who told his hopeful son that he could never go wrong in flattering a woman, for women were foolish and frail without exception: "I never knew one in my life who had good sense, or who reasoned and acted consequentially for four-and-twenty hours together." And so _must_ think every man who lived as men of fashion then lived. "If I dwelt in a hospital," said Dr. Franklin once, "I might come to think all mankind diseased."

But a man need not be a fine gentleman nor a _roué_ to think ill of womankind. He needs only to be commonplace; and hence it is that the homely proverbs of all time bear so hardly upon women. The native land of the modern proverb is Spain, as we might guess from Sancho Panza's exhaustless repertory; and most of those homely disparaging sentences concerning women that pass current in all lands appear to have originated there. What Spain has left unsaid upon women's foibles, Italy has supplied. Most of the following proverbs are traceable to one of the two peninsulas of Southern Europe: "He that takes an eel by the tail or a woman by her word may say he holds nothing." "There is one bad wife in Spain, and every man thinks he has her." "He that loses his wife and a farthing hath great loss of his farthing." "If the mother had never been in the oven, she would not have looked for her daughter there." "He that marries a widow and three children marries four thieves." "He that tells his wife news is but newly married." "A dead wife's the best goods in a man's house." "A man of straw is worth a woman of gold." "A woman conceals what she knows not." "As great a pity to see a woman weep as to see a goose go barefoot." "A woman's mind and winter's wind change oft." "There is no mischief in the world done but a woman is always one." "Commend a wedded life, but keep thyself a bachelor." "Where there are women and geese, there wants no noise." "Neither women nor linen by candle-light." "Glasses and lasses are brittle ware." "Two daughters and a back-door are three thieves." "Women commend a modest man, but like him not." "Women in mischief are wiser than men." "Women laugh when they can and weep when they will." "Women, priests, and poultry never have enough."

Among the simple people of Iceland similar proverbs pass current: "Praise the fineness of the day when it is ended; praise a woman when she is buried; praise a maiden when she is married." "Trust not to the words of a girl; neither to those which a woman utters, for their hearts have been made like the wheel that turns round; levity was put into their bosoms."

Among the few broadsides of Elizabeth's reign preserved in the British Museum there is one which is conceived in perfect harmony with these proverbs. It presents eight scenes, in all of which women figure disadvantageously. There is a child-bed scene, in which the mother lies in state, most preposterously dressed and adorned, while a dozen other women are idling and gossiping about the room. Women are exhibited also at the market, at the bakehouse, at the ale-house, at the river washing clothes, at church, at the bath, at the public well; but always chattering, gossiping, idling, unless they are fighting or flirting. Another caricature in the same collection, dated 1620, the year of the _Mayflower_ and Plymouth Rock, contains seven scenes illustrative of the lines following:

"Who marieth a Wife upon a Moneday, If she will not be good upon a Twesday, Lett him go to y{e} wood upon a Wensday, And cutt him a cudgell upon the Thursday, And pay her soundly upon a Fryday; And she mend not, y{e} divil take her a Saterday, That he may eat his meat in peace on the Sunday."

To complete the record of man's ridicule of the sex to which he owes his happiness, I add the pictures given in this chapter, which bring that record down to date. They tell their own story. The innocent fun of English Cruikshank and Leech contrasts agreeably with the subtle depravity indicated by some of the French caricaturists, particularly by Gavarni, who surpasses all men in the art of exaggerating the address of the class of women who regard men in the light of prey. The point of Gavarni's satire usually lies in the words printed underneath his pictures, and the pictures generally consist of the two figures who utter those words. But the expression which he contrives to impart to his figures and faces by a few apparently careless lines is truly wonderful, and it can scarcely be transferred to another surface. He excels in the expression of a figure with the face turned away, the whole effect being given by the outline of the head three-quarters averted. There is one picture of his, given on the following page, of a woman and her lover, he sitting in a chair reading _with his hat on_, indicating the extreme of familiarity, she standing at the window sewing, and keeping an eye on the pavement below. "He's coming!" she says; "take off your hat." In the attitude of the woman there is a mingled effect of tranquillity and vigilance that is truly remarkable. In all the range of caricature it would be difficult to find a better specimen of the art than this, or a worse. The reader may be curious to see a few more of these _fourberies de femmes_, as evolved from the brain of the dissolute Gavarni. It is almost impossible to transfer the work of his pencil, but here are a few of his verbal elucidations:

Under a picture of a father and daughter walking arm-in-arm: "How did you know, papa, that I loved M. Léon?" "Because you always spoke of M. Paul."

Two young ladies in confidential conversation: "When I think that M. Coquardeau is going to be my husband, I feel sorry for Alexander." "And I for Coquardeau."

Two married ladies in conversation: "Yes, my dear, my husband has been guilty of bringing that creature into my house before my very eyes, when he knows that the only man I love in the world is two hundred leagues from here."--"Men are contemptible" (_lâches_).

Husband writing a note, and his wife standing behind him:

"MY DEAR SIR,--Caroline begs me to remind you of a certain duet, of which she is extravagantly fond, and which you promised to give her. Pray be so good as to dine with her to-day, and bring your music with you. For my part, I shall be deprived of the pleasure of hearing you, for I have an engagement at Versailles. Pity me, my dear sir, and believe me always your affectionate

COQUARDEAU."

A young man in wild excitement reading a letter:

"On receipt of this, mount, fly; overtake in the Avenue de Neuilly a yellow cab, the steps down, gray horse, old coachman, 108, one lantern lighted! Follow it. It will stop at the side door of a house at Sablonville. A man and a woman will get out. That man--he was my lover! And that woman--she is yours!"

Lady fainting, and a man in consternation supporting her head: "Clara, Clara! dearest, look up! Don't! Clara, I say! You don't know _any_ nice young man! I am an ass, with my stupid jealousy. And you shall have your velvet shawl. Come, Clara! Now then, Clara, _please_!"

Lady dropping two letters into the post-office. First letter:

"MY KIND AMÉDÉE,--This evening, toward eight, at the Red Ball. Mind, now, and don't keep waiting your

CLARA."

Second letter:

"MY HENRY,--Well-beloved, judge of my despair--I have a sore throat that is simply frightful. It will be impossible for me to go out this evening. They even talk of applying twenty leeches. Pity a great deal, and love always, your

CLARA."

In these numberless satires upon women, executed by pen and pencil, there is a certain portion of truth, for, indeed, a woman powerfully organized and fully developed, but without mental culture and devoid of the sentiment of duty, can be a creature most terrific. If the possession of wealth exempts her from labor, there are four ways in which she can appease the ennui of a barren mind and a torpid conscience. One is deep play, which was, until within seventy years, the resource chiefly relied upon by women of fashion for killing the hours between dinner and bed; one is social display, or the struggle for the leadership of a circle, an ambition perhaps more pernicious than gambling; another is intrigues of love, no longer permitted in the more advanced countries, but formerly an important element in fashionable life everywhere; finally, there is the resource of excessive and ceaseless devotion, the daily mass, the weekly confession, frequent and severe fasting, abject slavery to the ritual. Of all these, the one last named is probably the most injurious, since it tends to bring virtue itself into contempt, and repels the young from all serious and elevated modes of living. Accordingly, in studying the historic families of Europe, we frequently find that the devotee and the debauchee alternate, each producing the other, both being expressions of the same moral and mental defect. But whether a mindless woman gambles, dresses, flirts, or fasts, she is a being who furnishes the satirist with legitimate material.

Equal rights, equal education, equal chances of an independent career--when women have enjoyed these for so much as a single century in any country, the foibles at which men have laughed for so many ages will probably no longer be remarked, for they are either the follies of ignorance or the vices resulting from a previous condition of servitude. Nor will men of right feeling ever regard women with the cold, critical eye of a Chesterfield or a Rochefoucauld, but rather with something of the exalted sentiment which caused old Homer, whenever he had occasion to speak of a mother, to prefix an adjective usually applicable to goddesses and queens, which we can translate best, perhaps, by our English word REVERED.