Part 5

All writers of books upon England mention the fact that, in the lower classes, a man gets rid of a lawful wife for the sum of a few shillings, and the critics never fail to cry "Exaggeration!" "Caricature!" Of course I did not escape the usual diatribes on the subject. I can understand being charged with having exaggerated, for I have remarked this year in the papers, two cases of wives having been sold for sixpence and a pint of beer respectively, whereas I had said that the price of the transaction varied from half-a-crown to ten shillings.

The article is going down, it is evident.

These cases must be much more frequent than they would appear to be from newspaper reports. Such transactions are naturally settled by private contract, and, as the English take very good care to keep at a respectable distance from these gentry, unique in the world, there is no means of knowing much about the matter. Now and then, some idiot, who has got rid of his wife in this unceremonious fashion, is simple enough to imagine that he can go and marry another directly. Then, accused of bigamy, he is sent to the Court of Assizes, the papers publish the case, and the affair thus comes to light.

The other day, a man who had married again after having sold his first wife, said to his judge: "My former wife is very happy with her new owner, my Lord; set me free, let me go home to my new wife, and I promise your Lordship that I will feed her." (_Sic._)

The appeal was a touching one.

The judge condemned him to six months' imprisonment.

Truly his Lordship had no bowels of compassion.

X.

Reflections of an Innocent upon Women in General and Englishwomen in Particular--Epistle to John Bull--Women's Rights--A Stormy Meeting--Viragos and other British Guys of the Sisterhood of St. Catharine.

Woman is an _objet d'art_ to be handled with circumspection, and when one has a few little truths to say to this last great gift of the Creator to man, one must set about it carefully, I admit.

Nevertheless, seeing that woman was given to us for our companion, more or less with our consent, why should we not be able to say to her politely, amiably, but frankly, addressing her collectively in her person: Come, ladies, let us see if we cannot arrive at some understanding. What do you want? I hear you constantly loudly demanding the emancipation of your sex. You can do without us; and as for our protection, henceforth you'll none of it. For you, in times past, have we drawn the sword; to-day you hold us scarce worthy to draw cheques at your bidding. You would be man's equal, as if you ought not to be amply content with being incontestably his superior. You have graces of body and mind, in a word, you are angels, men pay you a homage that falls little short of worship. Do you crave fresh duties that you may place man under new obligations? He will go bankrupt, I assure you. Your first duties are to be tender, true, and fair to see. You have every intention of continuing to be the latter, we have no doubt, but you mean to be tender and sweet no longer. You mean to strike, as your sisters did in the days of Aristophanes. Now, on what terms will you reinstate us in your good graces? Will you change lots with us? I do not suppose we should offer much opposition to that; for if we Frenchmen have the bump of amativeness, we pay dearly enough for it to prevent our being likely to be proud of it. Does it not seem to you that, all things considered, you have the more enviable lot? Dispensers of happiness, have you not the world at your feet?

You want to be learned? But you are learned, in the heart's lore, by nature. You want to be free? But we are your slaves confessed. You want to make the laws? But your lightest word is law already. And besides, between ourselves, do you not make your husbands vote pretty much as you please, in the Chamber of Deputies? You want to have more influence in the higher councils? But are you not satisfied with knowing that it was a woman who was the cause of the fall of the human race; that a woman has been the cause of every great catastrophe from the siege of Troy down to the Franco-Prussian war; that, in a word, woman has ever inspired our noblest actions and our foulest crimes?

You are proud of saying that to your sex belonged Joan of Arc, Jane Hachette, Charlotte Corday, Madame de Staël, and George Sand. Quite true; but, as I have had the honour of telling you before, woman was intended to be a companion for man. Now could you find me many gentlemen who would have been happy to take to wife anyone of the ladies I have just mentioned?

The rights of woman! what a fine phrase! what a pretty farce! what a sonorous platitude!

No, dear ladies, be not led away by those spectacled blue-stockings who seek to estrange us from one another. The more you try to resemble us, the more you lose your charm: electric fluids of the same name repel one another; electric fluids of opposite kinds attract each other.

The name of woman will ever be glorious so long as it is synonymous with beauty, tenderness, sweetness, devotion, all the sacred troop of virtues; it will be glorious, thanks to the Lucretias, the Penelopes, the Cornelias, ancient and modern, to the devoted daughters, the loving wives, the adorable mothers, to the thousands of obscure heroines who remind us, in the words of the poet of Antiquity, that the most virtuous women have been those whom the world has heard least of.

* * * * *

A witty French lady, who has also the talent of being pretty and very amiable, reminded me the other day that Madame de Girardin had said, that out of a hundred women, you would find but two stupid ones. If England possessed, or had ever had a Madame de Girardin, we might possibly read in some book, that out of a hundred English women, you will find two witty. But this does not prevent John Bull from getting on in the world. Very much the contrary: England made all her great conquests at a time when her women were treated with about as much consideration as the inmates of an Eastern harem, and it is to this masculine independence, this indifference towards women, that the success of the English may partly be ascribed. Our mothers in France are matchless; but they tie us to their apron-strings too much: they make us more supple and more amiable, but they enervate us. From our mother's yoke we pass, after a short liberty, more or less capable of improving us, to that of our wives. I will repeat it, cry it upon the house-tops: from the cradle to the tomb we allow ourselves to be led like lambs by women. The chains are charming, the servitude is of the sweetest! that I do not wish to deny; but servitude it is none the less; and if we are to go and found colonies, empires, in Africa, China, and I don't know where else, we must have pioneers, and it is not the fine young fellows, of whom the mothers of the present day are so proud and so careful, that will go and transplant our civilisation outside our dear fair country.

The Englishman leaves his mother without more emotion or more ceremony than we should show in taking leave of our landlord. If he be married, he announces to his wife that he has decided to set out next week for Australia. She gets his trunks packed, an operation less lengthy in England than in France, and off they go.

In our country, a woman follows her husband by law; here she follows him by instinct. In France, woman is a dream; in England she is a necessity, a habit.

Condé and Turenne were led by women; Wellington and Nelson ill-treated their wives.

Corneille's heroines are Roman women, with hearts of gold, and wills of iron, full of sublime devotion. Shakespeare's heroines are, for the most part, slaves or simpletons: Juliet is a spoilt child, Desdemona a kind of submissive odalisque, Beatrice a pretty prattle, and Ophelia a goose.

"Madam," said a polite prince of the House of Wasa to his wife, "we married you that you might give us children, not advice." A remark worthy of Napoleon I. The Englishman says the same thing to his wife. So Mrs. John Bull gives her husband plenty of children, but very little advice.

But things are altering. Thanks to the higher education that is being administered to young Englishwomen; thanks to Girton College, Newnham College, the High Schools, and other institutions that are being founded day by day, with the object of stripping woman of the attributes that render her so attractive in our sight, all that has been said and repeated about the reserve, the modesty, the innocence of the Englishwoman, the virtues that made of her a model wife and housekeeper, all this, I say, will soon be quite out of date.

Formerly girls were sent to receive their education at the hands of some good women who did not teach them much, I am prepared to admit, but who did not fail to fit them to be good wives, good mothers, and good housekeepers. Now they are taught Latin and Greek, mathematics and natural philosophy, political economy and medicine, yes, medicine, and no one knows what besides. They wear men's hats known as wide-awakes (much too wide awake to please most of us), and masculine looking coats, and they stare you in the face in manly fashion. When are the trousers coming?

Take care, friend John, you are on a downward and dangerous path. I see you presiding over meetings of blue-stockings and hear you adding your voice to theirs in their demand for women's rights. It seems to me that it is your future happiness that you stake. You will have a wife who will know the differential and integral calculus, but will be all unskilled in the art of making those nice puddings and pies you like so much. No more warm slippers awaiting you by the fender; instead of the song of the kettle on the hob, that sweet household melody, you will hear the litany of the Rights of Woman; no more kisses on your wife's half-closed eyelids, she will wear spectacles. You will be able to console yourself, by taking refuge in your club, and grumbling there to your heart's content, or by going to a restaurant and, at the price of a tip, buying the right of blowing up the waiter. But remember that, to have a good grumble in, there's no place like home; and if your dinner is not to your liking, why, you can blow up your wife for nothing.

* * * * *

Some English ladies are moving heaven and earth to get Parliament to pass an Act which will allow them to vote. They will, perhaps, one day go so far as to demand seats in the House of Commons.

What is to be done with the women? Owing to the emigration of the men, this is indeed a problem that England will ere long have to solve in one way or another.

"The emigration of two or three hundred thousand of our women would be a great boon to us," said Lord Shaftesbury the other day; "it would even be the greatest blessing that could happen to England." The wish is not a gallant one, but it is sensible and practical.

It is even calculated that, if this wish could be realised, the number of women that would remain, would still surpass by 500,000 the number of her Britannic Majesty's male subjects.

Now, supposing that one day or the other every man enters the holy estate of matrimony, the above figures prove that, in this realm, about 800,000 ladies are condemned to a condition of single blessedness. Miss Miller, Miss Cobbe, and other leaders of the Sisterhood of St. Catharine would quickly remedy this sad state of things, if they were allowed to vote, and one day to change the _Parlement_ into _Bavardement_.

Miss Cobbe, the destroying angel of Man's rights, exclaimed at a meeting held in London, on the 13th of June, 1884, that "she regretted that she could not fight and pull down park railings to accomplish her object."

This is promising, is it not?

At the same meeting, Miss Miller announced her intention of paying no more taxes.[5] "I will force the tax collector," she said, "to break into my house and sell my goods by auction, when I shall have a gathering of friends to protest against the injustice done to women, with the full intention of making my resistance more forcible and myself more disagreeable and troublesome to the authorities every year."

[5] To the great amusement of the peaceful inhabitants of London, this lady has just carried out her threats. You will, however, be glad to hear that her friends managed to restore to her the distrained goods, so that the little performance did not tell much on the lady's purse.

This is energy worthy of a better cause.

It is needless to add that such ladies are mostly unclaimed blessings, and that none of them set up as professional beauties. When a woman is beautiful, she is generally content with playing a woman's part; when she is a mother, this sublime _rôle_ is sufficient for her. These tedious persons embrace the thankless career of advocates of woman's rights, because they have never found anything better to embrace. And these excellent ladies must not put it into their heads that they have created the part, for it existed in the days of Aristophanes: Praxagora was neither more nor less ridiculous than the present champions of Women's rights.

It would be the reverse of generous for a man to reproach a woman with being an old maid. When a man does not marry, it is for want of an inclination; when a woman does not marry, it is for want of an invitation.

However that may be, the old maid is a social failure, and, in England, almost a social evil. At all events, she is a social nuisance, when she sets up as an institution, a system, and claims the right of being placed at the helm _ex-officio_.

It is quite right that the old maid should be respected, when she consents to remain an obscure heroine, and to devote to doing good the energies that it is not her lot to be able to devote to the sacred duties of a wife and mother; let her be tolerated when she pounces upon her fellow-creatures, in their houses, in omnibuses, and in trains, to try to convert them; let her be pitied, when she is reduced to the necessity of wasting her treasures of love on her cat and her parrot. But when she talks of devoting her spare energies to striking terror into the breast of man, it is high time that some Member of Parliament should see if there is no possibility of passing a bill through the House (before she gets in) to dispose of her, as widows are disposed of in Malabar.

XI.

Women at Home--Daughters, Wives, Widows, and Mothers--Comparisons--The Hospitality of Mrs. John Bull--Provincial Life.

The young girl is the heroine of English society. Free and accessible, she is more attractive as a woman, but perhaps less tempting as a future wife, than the timid and sweet young French girl.

She walks out alone, travels alone, and gives you a shake of the hand that is enough to put your shoulder-blade out of joint.

Her favourite occupations are walking and riding, and the game of lawn-tennis, which develops her form and her taste for flirtation. She carries her head erect, her shoulders square, and, as you look at the pump-handle swing of her arms, you feel that if occasion required, she would be able to defend herself and give the man, who treated her with disrespect, a sound box on the ears.

Her frank and fearless bearing is her surest protection: it is the bearing of confidence and security.

The young married woman is much more fascinating in France than in England.

The Frenchwoman gains her liberty when she marries, the Englishwoman loses hers. The latter becomes a minor for the rest of her days, from the moment she has pronounced the fatal _I will_. The former is, on the contrary, emancipated by these magic words.

If the Frenchwoman has her own way in the household, she has very often richly earned it. It is, unfortunately, not rare to see parents offer to their child, as a companion of her joys and sorrows, a man of forty, bald and unwieldy, who, after having run through health, fortune, and all the romance he ever had about him, is willing to bestow the rest upon her in exchange for her dot, her youth, her beauty, and her virtues. It is a fact, though a sad one, that the husband a French mother most ardently desires for her daughter, is a staid, serious man, a man of experience, a notary, for instance. The notary is quoted very high in the French matrimonial market.

It is a man of sound, ripe qualities, Madame, that you want for your daughter. Ripe! sleepy, you mean, no doubt. And your charming daughter, who has perhaps woven her little romance, built her bright castles in Spain, as she danced with some handsome young cavalier of twenty-five, accepts your choice without a murmur. He is still brisk, he is well preserved, you say to yourself: a quiet, steady man, who will have only my daughter's happiness at heart. But, Madame, does it never occur to you that the idea of the fair young head of a girl of eighteen, pillowed beside that bald or grey one, is nothing short of revolting? When will you cease preaching to your daughters the theory that a husband is a stupid animal, created and sent into the world to buy dresses and diamonds, and that it is seldom he is in a position to acquit himself properly in this respect at the age of twenty-five? A husband of forty who places diamonds in his wife's ears, that may be very nice; but a husband of twenty-five who lodges lovely kisses in his wife's neck, that is much nicer still. Give your daughters liberty to make their own choice, as is done in England, and you will soon see the kind of article they prefer. Give your charming girls to fine young men who love them; and, hand in hand, they will bravely fight the battle of life, bring up numerous families of robust children to brighten your declining years, and will grow old together, always young and handsome in each other's eyes, as on the day of their betrothal.

In England, a woman marries whom she likes. This system is not without its drawbacks. Thus the sister of a well-known titled lady has become a simple baker's wife; and not long ago, I read in the papers that a baronet's daughter, who had married one of her father's grooms, sought to be separated from her husband, because he did not exactly treat her with the kindness he had always shown to his master's horses.

Every rule has its exception, every medal its reverse side; but this does not prove the rule to be a bad one, or the medal to be made of base alloy. The liberty and confidence accorded, in England, to youth and even to childhood, are much better calculated to instil into them the sentiments of independence, self-respect, and responsibility, than the system of watchfulness and mistrust, in which French children, whether at home or in school, are brought up. When I spoke of youth and childhood, I might have added that even the very babies have their liberty; for, in England, they are not swathed and transformed into little mummy-like bundles; their heads are left uncovered, their limbs unconfined, they can stretch and kick to their heart's content. Up to four or five years of age, they wear no long stockings, but their little calves are allowed to grow brown and hardy with exposure to the summer's sun and winter's wind; yet, I am not aware that the English are less straight about the legs or more bald about the head, than the French, whom I would remind that Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote, "The countries in which the children are swathed, are the ones which swarm with hunchbacks, and cripples of every description."

Air, air, more air! is the constant cry of our children.

* * * * *

English girls rarely marry before they are twenty-two or -three years old; many make very good marriages, when they are close upon thirty.

In this country, marriages are not knocked up in a few days, nor in a few months. A young man of about twenty will engage himself to a girl of eighteen, and the lovers remain thus engaged for two, three, and four years.

For the young girl, it is a delightful time. During her engagement, she enjoys almost all the pleasures of matrimony, knows none of its cares; moreover she is free. It is no wonder she often does her best to make the pleasure last as long as possible. She had rather murmur sweet nothings with her lover, than shut herself up with him in a semi-detached, and murmur against the price of coals and butter.

The day she marries, she is said to be settled, that is, established, extinguished.

I do not wish to imply that, in an English household, the wife does not find happiness awaiting her; nothing is further from my meaning. On the contrary, I should say that she could enter upon her new life with more confidence than her French sister, because the responsibility she assumes is smaller, and because she has invariably been taught how to keep house.

In France, the wife is the confidante, and, I say it to her honour, the mistress of her husband. In England, she is only the mistress of the household, the housekeeper.

In France, it is generally the wife of a tradesman who has charge of his books and his cash-box, and never were either intrusted to better guardianship than that of the goddess of order and economy that men call _la Française_. If she happens to lose her husband, she is capable of carrying on the business without him, and I could name a great number of important houses of business that are managed by widows--the famous BON MARCHÉ among others. The emancipation of woman, in France, is proclaimed by the frequency of the inscription _Mdlle. So-and-so_, and _Mdme. Vve. So-and-so_, over the shop doors. It is independence.

In England, a wife knows nothing of her husband's affairs--not more than a clerk knows of the affairs of his employer, and it would often be hard for her to say whether he is on the road to riches or to ruin. At the death of her husband, an Englishwoman, who has not enough to live on, becomes a governess, a lady companion, a housekeeper, or a nurse. It is servitude.

An Englishman gives his wife so much a month for the expenses of the house, and a certain sum for her dress: her wages. It is without much astonishment she learns one fine morning that her husband is about to take her to a sumptuous new home, or that circumstances, over which she has no control, make it expedient that the removal of their goods, by the back door, shall take place next evening: she follows the furniture.

The Bohemian temperament of the Englishman contrasts strangely with his habits of industry and his reserve: it is a curious blending of the ant and the grasshopper.

The Frenchman has but one aim, as he works: to put by some money that shall bring him in a little income, and allow him to retire from toil.

The Englishman spends as he goes. The workman and the peasant, though they earned two pounds a day, would be satisfied with the provision made for them by the parish, should they outlive their working days. The English house shows that its inmates take little thought for the morrow: few cupboards, no wine cellars. I speak of London houses, with rents rising to £100 a-year. The Englishman orders in a dozen of wine at a time, and keeps it in his sideboard. In France, the ordinary provincial house is a veritable ant's store. Even the modest cobbler has a dark dry corner, where he can put his hand upon a dusty bottle of old Bordeaux the day that he has one of his family to nurse, or an old friend to feast. The cellar is to the Frenchman what the linen-press is to the Frenchwoman, a sanctuary.

* * * * *

I am constantly hearing on all sides complaints of the stagnation of business. The farmers make loud lamentations: the earth refuses to yield them her increase, and they can no longer make a living on British soil.