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 olivebranches 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 endall 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. 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

1 Anna Karenina.

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, anaemia, dyspepsia, enfeeblement of the sight. 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."2 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.

chuckles Roger de Collérye, addressing himself here, however, to men. 2"It ought to be a voluptuousness somewhat circumspect and conscientious. . . . Is not a man a miserable creature? He is scarce come to his own strength by his natural condition, to taste one only complete, entire and pure pleasure, but he laboureth by discourse to cut it off: he is not wretched enough except by art and study he augment his misery. (Montaigne, bk. i. cap. xxix. [Florio's translation]).

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