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.