CHAPTER IV

THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS

If the sons were destined almost inevitably to disappoint their mothers’ hopes, the daughters were to compensate for that disappointment. We must crave pardon for entering into all these details. It is impossible to set forth the story of a woman’s heart without first of all plumbing as deeply as possible the secret of those holy passions which move women as mothers and as daughters. We started from the solid ground of marriage after the old style, a mere physical and rational fact. The sensibility of women begins to blossom out on coming into contact with physical wretchedness; it creates the sick-nurse and the alms-distributor; it is then that the mother is born. Her love for her sons has nothing but separation to look forward to; but in the love of mother for daughter a woman’s heart finds another stay. Here there is no interference to be feared from a third party. The daughter belongs to the mother, and the father does not even seek any share in their intimacy: “Women’s policy hath a mystical proceeding; we must be content to leave it to them.”[79] Let the father provide the girl’s dowry, that is all that is required of him. In the formal and somewhat Philistine society which was the outcome of the Middle Ages, the several shares of the parents were very clearly defined.

But these things which the father knew nothing about are of the greatest interest for us. We want to know what went on between mother and daughter, and how the women of the future were being formed, for then we shall know also whether the mother was able to fashion for herself a lasting joy in her home, and whether she was so well satisfied with the principles on which she herself had been brought up as to apply them to her daughter. Later on we shall have to treat of more momentous questions, of ideas much more highly artistic and philosophic, but we shall meet with none from which a more thorough knowledge of the inner workings of feminine souls is to be gained. In the slightest question of education all the social questions have their echoes, as we hear the roar of the ocean in a shell.

Historians are very far from agreement in the information they give us as to the manner in which young girls were educated in those days. An old, but false, proverb runs: “The mother feeds, the father instructs”; which signifies in plain language that the mother never instructed, suckling being the top of her capacity. On the other hand, as the treatises on education speak only of the boys, or at most of “children,” and practically never use the word “daughters,” some historians have concluded that the girls were left to vegetate and that their education was never considered, while others, on the contrary, and these not the least important—such as Burckhardt and Minghetti—have believed that the girls merely followed the same course as the boys.

We shall not traverse these two opinions, contradictory as they are, because they both appear true to a certain extent.

The question of education really depends on another question, of much greater moment, which we have set ourselves to answer in this book: What ought women’s life to be? Where ought they to seek their happiness? And at the outset we are brought face to face with a very troublesome problem. Is a woman to continue to be married passively, as we have seen her married—to be left almost a slave? or is she to be put into a condition of self-defence? Is she to be made an obedient tool, a mirror of the ideas of others, destitute of all mind of her own, and all the happier in knowing nothing beyond the narrow bounds of her bedroom? or does it seem better to render her an active, educated creature, with an individuality of her own, capable of reasoning and acting? Is the mother to remain merely a temporary guardian, charged with watching over a little girl for a master of undisputed title, who will form her and train her after his own fancy, and to whom she will belong at the earliest moment, even in her first flower? or is the mother to be at perfect liberty to link herself closely with her daughter, and, precisely because the girl is one day to be given to another, to arm her with independence and intelligence, even although she knows that sooner or later some portion of this armour must be dropped on the way? There is the whole question. And on that question depends the education of girls.

In the first case (that is if we adopt the time-honoured theory) the mother was preparing a blank page. She had little to do except to promote as hardy a vegetation as possible, a blossoming out into strength and beauty, to maintain absolutely unbroken quietude, to respect and even prolong the days of childhood.[80] There is no need here for lengthy dissertations: the system consisted in proscribing everything that involved the slightest mental exertion, even in the form of little pastimes; in preserving an absolute simplicity, a cloistral existence;[81] in shunning even physical exercises if they were at all energetic. From the intellectual standpoint it allowed, on the artistic side, some trifling pieces of needlework (tapestry, netting, or the like); music, not suggestive or light, but classical music; as recreative reading, some elementary books of religion or morality; in science, some notions of physics, agriculture, medicine, some philosophical expositions of great moral questions, such as original sin, the Redemption, the immortality of the soul, and the Creed in general. That was what had gone to form the little bride, the robust, sedate, matter-of-fact, shy little creature whom at the beginning of this book we saw led to the altar. She was ignorant, but so much the better: she was only being born into life, but she brought as her stake a solid health and a well-balanced character generally; and at thirteen years, that was a good deal. The husband would do the rest.

And it must not be imagined that this system, barbarous as it may seem to some, was regarded as at all ill-conceived. It had numerous friends. The learned of the Middle Ages, from the venerable Egidio Colonna[82] to the illustrious Gerson,[83] had formed no other idea of women’s needs. Gerson even enunciated the aphorism (which, however, must not be pressed): “All instruction for women should be looked at askance.” In this the philosophers were at one with the physicians, whose advice was to err on the side of caution. In support of their position, they invoked the great name of St. Chrysostom,[84] and that of Lycurgus also, who wished to prolong the childhood of young girls to the eighteenth year (and this in Greece), and to devote the whole period to the care of the body.

On this system, the mothers could not form close ties with their daughters, still less enter into their life. One mother, however, inspired by her ardent devotion to an only daughter, and at the same time thoroughly conversant with the actual necessities of life—Anne of France—has shown to what good account these apparently rudimentary opportunities might be turned, while paying due respect to the advice of Gerson and the physicians. She set down her views in a little work, of a purely practical and intimate character, designed for her daughter’s use, and written day by day with a certain desultoriness, according to the line her reflections or her reading happened to take, and without the slightest intention of supporting a thesis. This book imparts to us _ex abrupto_ the secret of her thoughts.

She pinned her faith to education, not to instruction; she desired an education that was spontaneous and in some sort automatic, which would result, not from a perfect intimacy between mother and daughter, still less from a sentiment of equality, but solely from a kindly, frank, and affectionate association, of such a nature that the mother would colour her child’s character “as good wine colours its cask.”

This gentle prescription assumes a wide mental culture to begin with, and a certain robustness of intelligence. Anne of France intended the moral and philosophic education of the girl to be carried out with the aid of Boethius, Plato, the fathers of the church, the ancient philosophers, and, it need hardly be said, in conformity with the “Instructions of St. Louis.”

On the other hand she did not trouble to develop the imagination or the emotions: she had a horror of affectation, of all that appeared to her to smack of the studied, the conventional, the theatrical: she would not permit it anywhere, either in dress, in which she rejected false simplicity and false elegance alike, or in conversation, studies, or conduct. She loved only the splendour of truth, the glorification of the real in its noble aspects. It was her aim to temper the young girl’s soul by instilling into her the habit of searching enquiry and deep thought, and of building her reasoning always on clear premises like the certainty of death or the existence of God.

From these principles there resulted, not a critical scepticism like that of Montaigne, Pascal, or Descartes, but, if one may say so, a vigorous and affirmative scepticism, that is to say, the absolute, perhaps even harsh determination to look the facts of life fairly in the face, as serious but ephemeral matters; and to abstain from giving them colours, shapes, an import which do not belong to them, from throwing a false halo about them. As a drowning man clings to a rope, so Anne of France clung to a precise and objective morality, which, firmly anchored on religious faith, defied discouragements and fatigues as well as illusions. Beyond the restless sea of mundane realities in all their nakedness, it pointed to other realities, which appeared to her just as clear, just as positive, and in which she found a steadfast beacon light.

In thus basing feminine education on individualism and a severe conception of the True, Anne feared rather than desired the intrusion of aestheticism. What was required, in her opinion, was to form strong women, vigorous in body and mind: she wished to develop strength of will and stability of character, which are practical virtues. Assuredly she had no personal scorn for the beautiful: she gave proof enough to the contrary. She loved an art full of sap and zest; she was a subtle connoisseur, a royal patron! Delight in beautiful things was so natural to her that she counted on transmitting the taste to her daughter. And she was accomplished in philosophy; she read Plato, a first step which some of the most confirmed lady platonists neglected. But she was persuaded that the period of struggle was only opening for women, and that they must arm themselves to maintain the fight. She had no bent towards German utilitarianism—she could not have contented herself with the studies Luther sanctioned, nor with the elementary programme of virtue which Calvin found all-sufficient: at the same time, she had no greater confidence in the idealism of Rome. The world was not yet perfect enough! She joyfully hailed the dawn, but did not believe that the day was yet fully come. Women must not be content with a dilettante reliance on impressions; they must make what they love an object of thought, and having formed their reasoned conception, must seek to realise it. For them to be queens would be admirable indeed; but for the present it is enough for them to escape crushing. What they need is will, and, as a consequence, intellect and individuality.

This was a clear enough scheme of life. In Spain the same ideas obtained so striking a success that people were not satisfied with the compromise devised by Anne of France, and with this wholly moral education which would leave the daughter for a few short years to her mother. Circumstances were urgent; there was no time to waste; ideas were at boiling-point: a part of the ancient principles, the physical and moral repose recommended by the physicians, was sacrificed, and the children were flung headlong into the whirlpool. Little girls sucked in Latin with their mother’s milk; then, the soul being expropriated, so to speak, for the public good, they were given a tutor at an age when they ought to have been learning nothing but how to walk; at seven they were expected to be able to maintain a conversation, and at thirteen to have finished their studies and be ripe for matrimony.

This programme, so vigorous that at first blush one would be tempted to think it a mere figment of the imagination, was not only propounded but largely practised by one of the most conspicuous men of the time—Vivès, the tutor of Isabella the Catholic’s daughters. Vivès went to England in the train of Catherine of Aragon, and in that country of matter-of-fact aspirations he could still have believed himself in Spain, so successful was he in rousing the same fire and enthusiasm for his ideas. His fervour led to a revolution, or rather, as Erasmus said with a smile, to a “topsy-turvydom” in high society; the men, who continued to scour the seas and do business in great waters, fell quite to the rear, while the young ladies, stepping to the front, engaged with a brisk rivalry in marvellous exhibitions of precocity. At thirteen, Lady Jane Grey read Plato in the original, and Mary Stuart delivered in public her first Latin speech; at fourteen, Queen Elizabeth translated a work by Margaret of France, _The Mirror of the Sinful Soul_. These wonderfully clever children were not confined to any particular country, and the same breeze fanned the same flame from John o’ Groats to Gibraltar. Saint Theresa, who was born in 1515, is an excellent type of her contemporaries. Bereft of her mother, and one of a family of twelve, she was certainly not the object of any special training, but kept pace with girls of her age; yet at six years she was already, to use her own expression, “swept away by a violent movement of love,” and had to be prevented from hurrying to Africa in the hope of being massacred and winning heaven cheaply. What singular girls!

The thing that urged them on was the general fear in which the husband was held, the pressing need of attaining, ere it was too late, a good condition of defence and even of superiority. The rising spectre of marriage fascinated teacher and taught alike. At ten years of age, to tell the truth, such personages as Anne of France and Margaret of France had already disposed of their heart! so that to overwhelm them with work was believed the best way to protect them against themselves. “The craters of Etna, the forge of Vulcan, Vesuvius, Olympus cannot compare their fires to those of the temperament of a young girl inflamed by high feeding,” cries Vivès. The more effectually to extinguish these flames Vivès reinforces the regimen of work with a course of cold water and a vegetable diet, and this he austerely names “the perpetual fast” of the Christian life; he proscribes dancing, and counts on serious studies to preserve them from vanity and to widen the scope of their intellectual activities. In short, while more sharply accentuating the scientific note than Anne of France, he has the same end in view. Like her, he is convinced, passionately convinced indeed, that it is right to set a straight course for marriage, having now only a half-hearted belief in the old ideal of virginity: he has, further, so rooted a horror of vain sentimentalities, affectations, romances, poetry, all sensibility real or affected, that he throws overboard Italian and French for his pupils: he wishes them to have wills and energies of their own. But like a true Spaniard, an enthusiast and yet a Stoic, he loves these warm, ardent natures. He is a little like that lord-justice who in his official tone interrupted a too pertinacious advocate, but under his breath bade him continue. He shrinks from the flames, but sees in them the instrument of regeneration. These little girls of thirteen, inured to the reading of Scripture, tricked out with history and ethics, with Xenophon and Seneca, he sends forth to the conquest of the world, to fulfil their vocation as women. He hopes that their initiation into Biblical exegesis will lead them to construct a philosophical religion for themselves, and that they will attain a rational appreciation of Catholicism as the source of justice and knowledge, and the sole panacea for society. That is the gist of his preaching to the daughters of Isabella the Catholic. Did Luther himself probe nearer the heart of the matter, or outline a scheme more novel and more magnificent?

Let us complete our portrait of Vivès, and at the same time that of many a young woman of the new generation, by adding that he by no means looked down on the practical knowledge of plain cooking, of domestic economy or the common medicines. It might be thought that he had no ardour but for the Bible, and there is no lack of ill-natured jesters who cast a stone at his Latinist ladies;[85] whereas, on the contrary, he spoke up for the kitchen, though to the detriment of dress and dolls. “What,” he cries, “is not a hand smutted with coal as good as a snow-white hand that is open to everyone?” It only needs a father or mother to fall ill, and he is perfectly happy, for then you will see his fair Latinist in neat white apron, bringing a cooling draught she herself has mixed, and bestowing one of those smiles for which one would gratefully gulp down a whole druggist’s shop. Here, according to him, is the distinguishing mark of his system; a practically useful intelligence, and a physical as well as moral devotion.

The Italian school drew its inspiration much more directly from the need of the ideal; it rejected passion as full of peril and made mere sensibility its goal. But it too pretended to take its stand on conceptions of absolute truth, though more elementary ones; and these it did not represent as intellectual acquirements, because it regarded, not knowledge, but feeling and judgment, as the end a woman ought to set before her. The education dear to this school was above all an education of impressions and enthusiasm, in which scientific truth only came in to supply ballast and to prevent an exaggerated serenity, or an over-confidence in life. In its refinement and elegance this school preserved as it were an after perfume from the noble city of Rome, where fastidious and ceremonious prelates, gourmets but not cooks, let money flow into their pockets through immense spiritual aqueducts, and set about pouring it away again in perfect cascades of ostentation. Hands smutty with coal indeed! A lazzarone would blush at the thought! There are none but princesses in Italy.

Dolce, a supreme example of the Italian, took, for the formation of an Italian woman, the recognised elements: chastity, modesty, reserve, composure, and a regular study (this was to be particularly free, with no expurgation) of the classics and the church fathers;[86] and from all this he would fashion for you the sweetest creature imaginable.

Idleness and melancholy were his two great foes: he had no hostility to love. What reason was there to abstain from carefully cultivating a young girl’s capacity for loving, seeing that as a woman she would find in it her chief resource? To reject the thought of love, to avoid the very utterance of the word, and then, like Vivès, to rack your brains to create infinite derivatives, was, according to Dolce, a childish and an untrustworthy proceeding; it would be much better to face the ordeal frankly, and deaden its shocks beforehand by anointing oneself with the healing balm of platonic doctrine, by exhibiting, on the one hand, the body in its wretchedness, the vileness of earthly love, and on the other the beauty of love divine and pure. Women may fall through passion, but they can win salvation through sensibility, and therefore Dolce nourished them on the appropriate classics: Virgil, parts of Horace, Dante, Petrarch, Bembo, Sannazaro,[87] and, more especially, Castiglione. To his opponents, however, this system seemed over-venturesome; they reproached him with going half-way to meet danger, with putting into hands still weak the two-edged sword which so often wounds lustier hands. To this objection Dolce returned on behalf of the beautiful the same answer that Vivès made on behalf of the true. He was convinced that a liberal education was most surely calculated to form strong souls, citing in support of his contention Corinna and a thousand other old-world heroines rendered impeccable by culture, and, of his own time, the four daughters of queen Isabel, pupils of Vivès; all four, indeed, equally accomplished and yet equally unfortunate—but could anyone begrudge them their misfortunes?

Thus, according to Dolce, abstract or severe studies were not for girls: “vain and futile quackeries” he called them, which could only bring them in subjection to men. “All that is needed is to awaken and foster the faculties which are in women.” To rule as with a rod of iron, women need only remain as they are, with the talents given them by nature.[88] What is the good of teaching them, for example, the dates and the nice problems of history? They should be taught to read history, to derive from the accurate narrative of facts an impression of the poignant emotions and moral struggles which the historian necessarily indicates with a more or less light touch, and then, linking these events together in their minds, to get at the heart of them, deduce the lofty moral principles controlling them. In philosophy they have no need of great metaphysical principles; but what is important for them is to understand that misery exists, that there is suffering everywhere, often hidden away and yet only too real. Woman is a fellow-worker with God! It suffices to lop off the thorns which cumber her; she will shoot up naturally towards the light, sucking, like a flower, the earth’s sap, which is love. The corn which is to go to the mill and make bread needs the plough’s rude toil, a lovely delicate flower often asks no more than a handful of earth and a bountiful sky.

And it was in this way that so many sweet Italian women blossomed out, almost spontaneously, delighting in life, themselves the joy and felicity of the world, all compact of poetry, archaeology, rhetoric, and philosophy—Attic through and through at thirteen years. The efflorescence was universal save at Venice, a country half-Germanic, half-Oriental, where they insisted on keeping the girls immured until their wedding-day, showing nothing of them but bundles of millinery on Sundays. And yet there do not appear to have been more angels at Venice than elsewhere, and no one succeeded there in resuscitating the type (henceforth unknown) of matrons hypnotised, as it were, by their husbands’ frown or the idea of death. Italy was peopled with fairy-like creatures, who thought nobly of all men and wore to admiration the double ornament of fine jewels and a fine intellect. “A little girl,” said Bembo, “ought to learn Latin: it puts the finishing touch to her charms.”

Louise of Savoy brought up her daughter Margaret according to these Italian principles at a period when France as yet did not understand them. Margaret blossomed like a flower: she knew something of everything (too much indeed), notably of philosophy and theology: she learnt Latin, Hebrew, Italian, and Spanish; but she could speak nothing but French.

At nine years of age, she was wonderfully clever and accomplished; at thirteen, she inspired so much admiration as to be considered “rather Persian than French.”

The defects of the system were not at once perceived, though these were developing in women a thirst like that of Tantalus, exciting a state of restless agitation and nervousness, which the old doctors of Gerson’s school professed to guard against and which Vivès fancied he had avoided by directing their activity towards a definite end. People were struck only with the immediate advantages. Erasmus uttered heart-rending plaints about the little girls he was ever meeting in the Low Countries, poor ignorant little creatures, thick-lipped, podgy, stuck on high heels so as to appear grown-up, over-dressed, rigged out with a load of ribbons and feathers, with all the airs of innocent little baggages: “I ask myself,” he cries, “if these are dolls, or monkeys, or girls.” How he would have liked to tear off all that flummery, and fill their beaks with a little Greek or French, or even a little Latin!

A simple fellow said to Margaret: “Men and women have different functions, but their virtues ought to be equal.” He was making a mistake; the virtues of women ought to be superior.

But if women believe that it is their mission to rule instead of to obey, or, at any rate, that the obedience they owe has well-defined limits; if they are no longer the burden which a father used to get rid of as soon as possible, and which a husband received as his absolute property, body and soul; if they desire to count for something; if marriage is regarded as the union of two persons equally free, as the close and not the commencement of education; if the wife is no longer the pupil of her husband, and it is considered better for her to come to him fully instructed: then a very natural consequence will inevitably ensue, whatever may be thought or said: women will marry later, will insist on exercising a choice as men do, and on laying down their own conditions: they will in this way imagine that they have greater freedom and are probably making a better bargain, for they have become women of sense.

The fortunate discovery was made that Lycurgus, in the main, considered twenty years the best age for marriage: with the result that in the most aristocratic families, and those most swayed by tradition, they waited with the most perfect resignation until the seventeenth year,[89] while ladies of exceptional courage held that it was “modern style” to marry much later. Margaret of France was not married till she was thirty-seven.

This reform, important as it was, did not end in making what we should regard as a happy girlhood possible.

However the Italian theory might wreathe life with roses and preserve a happy ignorance of physiological problems, it was not easy for a French girl to reach that point and retain this beautiful innocence, surrounded as she was by people who called a spade a spade, idealising things no more than in the days when she was married as soon as born.

Girlhood was not a delightful fiction which permits infinite hopes to be cherished, and keeps realities hidden; it was rather an apprenticeship; and after all, since the wife has a personal mission to accomplish in the world, which will consist, so to speak, in patching and renovating hearts that are rent, this apprenticeship seems as necessary to her as to a laundress or a dressmaker.

The art cannot be learnt more successfully than in maidenhood.

From the moment this was admitted, it is correct to say, girls received the same education as men: with this qualification, that their education was more thorough, because they made a later beginning in life.

In the first place, they had male teachers, or even a tutor. Margaret of France, like her brother, was taught only by tutors—a singular anomaly at a time when women plumed themselves on their superiority, and one which we shall not seek to explain. Humanists with the highest admiration for woman’s intellect held governesses in horror,[90] and allowed no discussion about the monopoly of instruction; even in Spain, the country of learned women, Vivès insisted on instruction by men.

And yet the market was not overstocked with women’s tutors; the part usually fell to more or less second-rate persons, who accepted it light-heartedly enough; even in princely houses there was considerable difficulty in keeping a man of real earnestness.

These young fellows readily transformed themselves into friends and comrades: Brantôme accuses them of a thousand irregularities, and goes so far as to match them with the physicians and apothecaries. Some of them were known, it appears, to elope with their pupils, but that we must believe to have been purely casual, and their gaiety to have taken, as a rule, a more delicate form. Eustorg de Beaulieu[91] smilingly reminds one of his pupils, now a staid wife and mother at Tulle, of the time when she raved about her lessons, and said she would rather go to the clavecin than to confession. Another pupil of his, the young Helen Gondy of Lyons, called him in fun “her Hector,” a title which he accepted on the distinct understanding that he was not stupidly to die for her, “like the other Hector.” A third, Mademoiselle de Tournon, conceived the idea of making a bishop of this excellent, jovial, amiable professor; but this time Eustorg raised objections, and declared flatly that he was sure his skull was too thick.

And so Dolce’s advice was followed; melancholy was banished. But I am not sure that very fine distinctions were drawn between the two kinds of love, or that the young masters possessed the delightful art of developing only the fancy and the softer qualities. In France and elsewhere, to all appearance, they rather treated their fair pupils in masculine fashion, with a fearless handling of ideas; that at least is the impression we get from Erasmus’ dialogues, _The Girl and the Lover_, _The Youth and the Courtesan_. Brantôme taunts them with a certain tendency to make special use of the risky passages in the Bible and their authors for teaching theology and an elegant style.

In this way the young girls attained a perfect independence of mind. They cannot even be compared with the American girl of to-day, for the old hardy, somewhat wild French stock had undergone a wonderful grafting with Italian refinement. Many of them, having reached a certain age, pursued their studies with marvellous gusto; Petrarch and Erasmus they thought rather poor stuff, preferring to work at Poggio[92] and Boccaccio. Their style of talk was intrepid! Ah! there was no standing on ceremony with them! Fun was fast and furious.

They devoured romances, novels and plays: these fine intrigues, these riotous passions seemed to them to constitute the ideal life. They were _demi-vierges_. “With all these lascivious romances, spotless virginity will be unknown.”

To describe the indignation and grief of old-fashioned people at this sight is impossible. “I would rather see a girl deaf or blind,” cries Vivès, “than thus overstimulated to pleasure.” Of course it was pleaded that the artistic instincts were being satisfied! But all these romances bore but little likeness to the subtle analyses of our days, which are sometimes masterpieces of philosophy: they were a tissue of adventures all equally untrue to life. Vivès did not understand how, if only from the point of view of taste, girls of any intelligence could go into raptures over such extravagances: a knight who is left for dead, but comes to life on the next page; a hero who massacres a hundred foes single-handed; nor how they could worship as a demi-god the author of such trash. He begs the mothers for pity’s sake to interfere, to take the trouble to glance through a book before leaving it to their girls; but the mothers are accustomed to live their own life, and besides, a lady of fashion has so many occupations! He beseeches the preachers for help, waxing almost indignant when he hears them pompously stringing together their platitudes on dogma instead of boldly attacking questions of living interest and condemning books that are absurd or of evil tendency. But the preachers go on preaching.

Anne of France took a more dispassionate view: she saw clearly enough that girls ought sometimes to put aside the church fathers, if only for the pleasure of going back to them, and she did not despair of finding a practical solution of the difficulty. Her dream was a very simple one—the dream that recurs again and again and yet remains but a dream: namely, to have good romances for young girls, pure, high-toned stories, replete with the practical philosophy of life, and at the same time interesting, dramatic, thrilling. She has left us a specimen, somewhat archaic indeed, of what she desired: a historical romance founded on a passage in Froissart about an unfortunate captain of Brest, one M. du Chatel, whose son is, with flagrant bad faith, threatened with death by the English if he does not betray the town into their hands. This eminently patriotic subject is the groundwork of a little story, short, simple, illustrated with a fair number of pictures, and in every way innocuous. In the opening scene, Madame du Chatel swoons; further on, however, it is she who, like a true woman, has all the strength of character, and cheers her trembling husband with words worthy of a Roman matron, or with magnificent appeals to the divine mercy, “although,” as she says, “children are in a special sense the sons and daughters of their mothers.” (How touching is this claim, interpolated quite incidentally!) So the story proceeds with alternations of strength and weakness. On coming to after a long swoon, the poor mother learns that her son is dead. “God’s will be done!” she says, without a tear; “may our Lord receive his soul!” And then she goes and dons her mourning, and, as soon as she is alone, weeps!

And here, so please you, you have a story for young girls!

Unluckily, for a girl of eighteen or twenty life is no longer “such stuff as dreams are made on,” and as a rule the romances, good or bad, are at last thrown into the shade by a certain practical romance in which she must needs play her part, and which demands her whole attention.

Not, assuredly, that all this led the young ladies to gild the pill or modify their first conception of marriage; on the contrary, the more they considered the matter, the more they weighed, in as just a balance as men, the advantages against the disadvantages. Very often, princesses of the blood royal loved simple noblemen, or even men of lower rank: they never married them. It was too well known that love and marriage were two different terms, and that certain old books, preserved in the libraries, maintained the theory that married women, “possessing what maids seem to seek,” should remain at home and never again exhibit themselves for the pleasure of others, or even for their own. Formerly a girl of ten years, repressed and secluded, could picture marriage as a source of “liberty and pleasure”; and these blessings once secured are sedulously guarded. You must be grateful to men for giving you their name and fortune, of course; but some men are so odd! It is impossible to take too many precautions. Many an excellent young man, pleasant enough to all appearance, may turn out an insufferable husband.

And so it was with mingled prudence and dilettantism that these fair sixteenth-century Americans set out in quest of the Golden Fleece. Little hampered by parents who thought their whole duty was done when they paid over the dowry, they learnt how pleasant it was to take life into their own hands, to show themselves in society, to talk, laugh, dance, frolic—live, in a word, without a by-your-leave to anyone. And yet the Latin delicacy and grace betray themselves in various prejudices: to practise archery, to pad themselves for a pass with the foils, or merely to have their photographs taken as naiads—these resources were not yet open to them! The poor things could only triumph by their charm and enthusiasm, quite in the Latin way, at the risk of rubbing off a little of their bloom here and there.

Outcries came from the dowagers: What! throw themselves at men’s heads in that way! how scandalous! and how silly! Do they think then that men are so stupid as not to consider serious qualities? For their amusement indeed they like the coming-on disposition, but not for marriage: it is Cinderella that attracts Prince Charming. Anne of France cites an illustration in point: three young Germans of the highest distinction arrived one day from the heart of their distant wilds with the sole object of wedding the three maids of Poitiers, of whom marvellous tales were told. It was a terrible shock when they found themselves each face to face with his own fair damsel. The first had so squeezed her waist that she well-nigh fell inanimate into the arms of her wooer, who was thoroughly put out; the second chattered like a very magpie; the third rather naïvely displayed a sentimentality in the latest mode; and the upshot was that, with never a word to one another, the three Germans were soon stride for stride footing it back to Germany. And Anne’s conclusion is very reasonable: “Would it not have been better to cultivate a staider manner?”

But it remained to be proved whether a staider manner would be right after all, and whether a princess, of however high descent, could indulge in the luxury of waiting at the chimney-corner until the man of her dreams was pleased to appear. Unhappily the contrary was the general belief. Someone has remarked that if men do not often marry the girl who pleases them, they do not always marry the girl who displeases them. And that is just the reason flirtation held its own.

The art of flirting is a very subtle one, and yet it is incredible how little time was required to bring it to perfection. Everybody had to do with it: even princesses wanted to fancy that they chose their husbands.

The young girl “came out” into the world in two ways. If she had no mother, or her parents found it convenient to separate themselves from her, there was in France a patriarchal custom, peculiar to that country, which consisted in the girl’s entering the service of a “dame” or “demoiselle” of good repute. So highly was this custom esteemed, that Anne of France recommended her daughter to conform to it should occasion arise, although the heiress of the duchy of Bourbon had certainly no need of entering anyone’s service to push her way in the world.

Anne herself, and Anne of Brittany, thus kept “schools of manners”—a sort of fashionable boarding-school, where the young men never addressed the girls but on bended knee in the ancient style, and where the somewhat cloistral austerity seemed mitigated by the belief that so excellent a place and so well guaranteed a virtue could not fail to tempt the most fastidious husbands. But this institution, intended to serve as a bulwark against the new manners, floated along, on the contrary, in their current: Catherine de’ Medici’s “flying squadron,” as it was called, completely lost the character of a boarding-school, and discharged its functions with freelance recklessness.

For the most part, it was at her mother’s side that a girl set off in quest of a husband. The plan of operations varied so greatly that no one will expect us to unravel its principles. All these young girls matched one another in _chic_. They never spoke to their mothers without bleating “Madame ma mère,” or lisping “By your favour, madam,” like so many well-behaved silly sheep. Many of them were for ever showing their teeth: they had a laugh for anything—a phrase, a fly, a gentleman with a bald head. One laughing sent the others into fits too, and that was thought remarkably witty. They were experts in the “sedate management of their green-blue eyes, full of softness and opened neither too little nor too much.” They wore lovely dresses—monumental robes which yet seemed rather an accompaniment than a vesture for their limbs. Some old folk (Vivès, for example) professed horror at their ring-loaded fingers, their pierced ears (a barbarous custom, to be sure!), those light, delicate touches of the brush with which they did up the face, and those subtle perfumes wafted from no one knows where: in all this they saw woful error, and even worse, rank folly. They sharply reprimanded the mothers, reproaching them for a multitude of things: for withering the natural goodness and charitableness of their daughters by fostering expensive habits; for inciting them to a false luxury, all vulgarity and tinsel, which is neither comely nor virtuous, and helps not a whit towards matrimony—at least it is to be hoped so, for it would be a great imprudence to depart so far from reality, and to entice a man into marriage by means of the rouge-pot and sham charms.[93]

But materfamilias is a lady of fashion, accustomed to shine in society, and seeing no harm in it; further, she is too good a mother not to desire success for her offspring, not to applaud a venturesome flight. She, too, has dreams of a Prince Charming; she has her enthusiasms, which take clear and definite shape in her mind as positive hopes. As for the father, he becomes cantankerous, and considers only the expense of the game; he is quite of the dowagers’ opinion, and thinks well enough of men to believe that they pay most attention to serious qualities. And so, in order to compose once for all this perpetual domestic wrangle, a great wag, Coquillart,[94] proposes to clothe the girls in parti-coloured dresses, one colour for the father, another for the mother.

When a girl makes a successful start, certain mothers are seized with a sort of fanaticism; we are wrong in calling it fanaticism: it is really a new outburst of good-heartedness and the passion for self-sacrifice of which women are possessed, for, if they reflected, they would clearly realise that personally they have nothing to gain by a brilliant match for their daughters.

Some of them push self-sacrifice to the point of servility; they efface themselves, walk in the rear, with the meek and deprecating bearing of a waiting-maid. That is a form of goodness which the women of former days would not have understood—Anne of France choked at the mere mention of it. She had commanded armies, bearded diplomatists, made men her puppets, checkmated her judges, manipulated her States-general, set her whole country in a ferment without a sign of feeling: but here she lost command of herself: “It is tomfoolery ... it is overweening presumption in the daughter, and in the mother sheer madness.”

Kisses, caresses, secret trysts, presents, love-letters, showers of rondeaus and ballads, stolen glances, songs more than gay—all this made French flirtation an exquisite pastime, essentially intoxicating in its charm. The good, modest young damsel, who would cast down her eyes in the street, was not a whit shocked at a pretty broad jest in the company of men:

Aucunes sont, qui, en humbles manières, Avec les folz jouent leurs jarretières.[95]

—_Bouchet._

In the evening by candle-light, ensconced in some nook of the spacious fire-place, young men and girls would sit unceremoniously on one another’s knees, laughing and talking nonsense. People who have got past these maidenly frolics themselves find it more and more difficult to become reconciled to them. Jean Bouchet feelingly describes them in his book, _Les Regnars traversant les voies périlleuses_, at a period when the art was still in its infancy. Young men easily get absolution: they naturally profit by opportunities of amusing themselves; and, besides, theirs is the passive part. But the girls! how venturesome they are, how light-heartedly they chip, at least in spirit, the poor remnant of their semi-virginity!

It would be a mistake to suppose that flirtation will in time lead to the introduction of the love element into marriage. These damsels are by no means anxious to allow the principle of earthly love—that is to say, a germ of divorce—to steal into their married life. Their ideal consists in falling in love with a man of wealth and established position, and so far it has a reassuring character, worthy of respect. At this stage of their life they are working for themselves, as later they will have to work for humanity. M. Bourget has discovered in America the different varieties of the sixteenth-century flirt: the professional beauty; the girl of ideas, who stumps a platform and stands for the parish council; the “jolly good fellow”; the girl of well-balanced philosophical mind; the coquette; the girl of ambitions; all are ambitious and to some extent coquettish, and even the philosophical girl gives the ideal only a secondary place.

But amid this charming round of coquetting and artless sensibility, passion sometimes flashes out—passion, at once the great peril of the Latin races and their eternal charm. One may be convinced that the heart has been subdued by cold calculation, and that love is laid under a spell by means of philosophy; but they burst their bonds! And here the parts are not distributed as one would wish: this generation is about to inflict a wound on platonism! Often it is the wife who, instead of serving as an idol, gives herself to love. In the terrible veins of French and Spanish women there flows a blood which they do not always succeed in mastering, the old blood of knights or peasants; they bruise themselves against the invisible mail-armour of modern life.

In the second act you would almost invariably see the serving-maid appear on the scene—the “confidante” of the plays, a good soul, as indulgent to everyone as she is to herself, devoted, and not more thick-headed than becomes her, thoroughly convinced that she has something to gain from every intrigue. The mother has her own affairs and her dignity to attend to, which keeps her in ignorance of what is going on; whilst with the maid there are private conversations, mutual unbosomings, a companionship in study of the facts of life. Lucky, indeed, if some smart lackey, let in on the strength of his ingenuous manner, does not put in his word!

Saint Theresa thus plunged with masterful strokes into the swirling tide of existence, with the aid of a serving-maid, at the age of fifteen. Her father placed her in a convent, but the walls were no barrier to her: she performed unheard-of feats, broke through the roof, wrenched away the gratings. She had to be despatched to a more reposeful situation—to an uncle stuffed with the fathers of the church, a man after Vivès’ own heart; from his care she returned with a passion for religion, and escaped once more, this time to enter a Carmelite convent in the teeth of opposition. She was now in her nineteenth year, and her trials, repentances, revolts were only just beginning; eighteen more years of struggle were required ere this tempestuous character was at last soothed definitively into mildness.

Unhappily, the girls’ little love affairs sometimes had graver consequences. Plays and novels show us situations awkward enough: in one of Parabosco’s comedies, the mother arrives a little behind the fair.

Laughing, boisterous, pitch-forked into life, the poor children do not pretend to have the ferocious virtues that men have not.[96] Is that their fault, since they have been brought up like men? If they go wrong, it is not from a bent towards wrong; it is as the birdling errs, buffeted by the storm on its first escape from the nest. To avoid risk altogether, they would have to remain for ever under the mother’s wing, as the early educators wished.

In the sixteenth century, there were still good people who wished girls to become deaf-mutes again, and constitute Our Lady “the guardian and warder of their hearts.” But such talk was not very effective.

Wise counsellors and practical preachers who advocated “retreats,” and knew the world, addressed themselves directly to the girls and sought to touch the chord of self-interest. The grave Jean Raulin,[97] from the eminence of one of the most fashionable pulpits in Paris, reasoned with them somewhat as follows: “To wed a widow, well and good! There is no fuss, no golden ring, no benediction, but withal it is a marriage: whilst with a counterfeit young maid presenting herself at the altar—! Ah! fair ladies, guard your purity to the very hour of your espousals, whether you be earthly or spiritual brides! That is the precious treasure you must at all costs save, and for many reasons: because of human frailty, according to the words of the 2nd Epistle to the Corinthians, ‘We have our treasure in earthen vessels’; because of its inestimable value, according to the words of Ecclesiasticus, chapter xxvi., ‘There is no price worthy of a continent soul’; because of the irreparability of the mischief, according to the words of St. Jerome, ‘God can do all things save restore a lost virginity.’”

Many could not help regretting the free country life, and fancied that fidelity to a more rigorous system of education would have yielded better results. Of a truth it would have been better to make women frank creatures of passion than coquettes or mere worldlings. But an honest glance at the life of rural folk was enough to assure the observer that utilitarianism does not elevate the manners. Yes, seen from a distance, the ways of country folk seem compact of smiles and caresses, love and candour: pigs and cows meet in the meadow or at the fair; lovers too meet, at church, at a dance, after those winter parties so hotly denounced by the preachers, nay, every morning and evening if their hearts bid them; and they can exchange little presents, meet to scrape the fiddle or twang the guitar, without anyone finding fault, save perhaps a rival with whom they are quits for a few rounds at fisticuffs, or at most a thrust with a knife. A fashionable young girl, you may be sure, would not be horrified at the exchange of a few good swashing blows for her; she is apt to regard life as too tame. It remains to discover whether to reduce life to its primitive simplicity is really to elevate it. The idealists thought not.