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? 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 onea 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!" 1 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,2 [The quotation is taken from the Heptameron, Tale 40. There the lady is named Nomerfide, whom the author identifies with a certain Mlle de Clermont.] 2" Anna: The maiden invokes with all her prayers the sweets of wedlock, and yet with the first amorous intoxication begin the woes of the conjugal bed; the woman is scarce nestled upon the heart of the man than with one consent they long for separation. Phyllis : Anna, little it recks me that thou decriest the bonds of wedlock and the crabbed sour race of men; my heart is a-fire with love and I am tormented with thirst for marriage. . . . I deem it better far to marry betimes; wedlock is a refuge where modesty may shelter herself."-(J. Cats, pp. 6, 7, 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. That was the opinion of all serious women, from Louise of Savoy to Anne of France, 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." 3 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 1 Heptameron, Tale 21. 2 [As these royal ladies are constantly cited in subsequent pages, the reader will allow us to remind him once for all of their relationships. Louise of Savoy was the wife of Charles, Count d'Angoulême, cousingerman of Louis XII., and the mother of Francis I. and of Margaret of Valois. She was a passionate and masterful woman and completely ruled her son, and her greed and intriguing spirit brought disaster upon France. Anne of France, also known as Anne of Beaujeu, was the eldest daughter of Louis XI., and wife of Pierre II. of Bourbon. She was virtual ruler of France during the first eight years of the reign of her brother Charles VIII.: see further Book III., chapter i. She is connected with English history in so far as it was largely her money that financed Henry of Richmond's successful enterprise against Richard III.] 8 No law in the world had yet authorised them to marry knowledge, advice, and consent of their fathers" (Rabelais). "without the 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 prin cesses 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.1 1 The good Anne of France, married to a husband much older than herself, had in her life a romance which has escaped notice. She was fond of her first fiancé : "Le predit duc de Calabre, famé, En l'espousant luy donna ung aneau, The duke died six years after the betrothal, "Qui fust ung deul qui bien tost ne passa, 1 In distinguished families, betrothal was by no means. unusual at the age of two or three. At this tender age Vittoria Colonna 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, the friend of Rabelais, vaunts his exploit in having wedded a girl of ten. In vain did the French But the princess clung to the ring of her former lover, symbol of "Loyalle amour dont estoit anoblie... 2 ... En cest aneau que luy avoit doné ["Of loyal love's ennobling influence. And with this ring, gift of her lover dead, Would she her husband Pierre de Bourbon wed,"] in order to preserve the memory of him whom God, in his unfathomable designs, had seen fit to take from her— "Pour petit cueur, d'une jeune pucelle, Bien garde est d'amour honneste C'est quant jamais ne varie ou chancelle..." -Poème inédit de La Vauguyon. ["To the sweet guileless heart of tender maid The princess was as pure a woman as any of whom we have any account, but the author dwells on this innocent romance in order to keep her memory alive in the hearts of lovers. [Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547) was the most illustrious member of an old and illustrious Roman family said to derive its name from the column to which Christ was bound for His scourging. At the age of seventeen she married the Marquis of Pescara, and when he died of wounds received at Pavia (1525) she refused many offers of marriage, and devoted herself to literature and works of piety. She wrote poems in imitation of Petrarch.] [Tiraqueau was the learned and genial seneschal of Fontenoy who released Rabelais from the tender mercies of the Franciscans, for which kindness he was eulogised in Pantagruel. He had a large family, wrote many books, and was a water-drinker; whence an anonymous epigram which, roughly rendered in English, reads: Tiraqueau, fruitful as the vine, Got thirty sons, but drank no wine; And had not water sapped his strength, So strenuous a man at length Had filled this world of ours-who knows?- |