CHAPTER V

THE HUSBAND AND THE VARIOUS WAYS OF SLIPPING HIS YOKE

The most troublesome question to be settled in regard to feminism is that of the authority of the husband. Legally, the husband was head of the household, an idea which found ready acceptance among the lower ranks of society, and which the people applied with its habitual logic. It won warm approval from Rabelais. Nothing struck men as more grotesque than a husband suspected of having allowed his wife to get the upper hand. An artisan of Bourges, at whom some unpleasant neighbours hummed a refrain about a woman who thrashed her husband, on that ground alone brought against them an action for slander.

In all sincerity, the husband considered himself an absolute owner, the lord and master, the head and soul of his wife, that “feminine and feeble creature” whom he condescended to take to his hearth, and who owed him, in the name of God and the law, “perfect love and obedience.” As to the wife, she was, so to speak, stepping into a railway train driven without her assistance. She had paid her fare, and wedlock stretched itself rigidly in front of her like the driver’s footboard, a place for manliness and nerve, but unromantic in the extreme. What matters to her the scenery along the line? The rippling sea may chant its amorous strains, the spring sun may dot the wilds with flowers, the tempest may sweep through the gorges, but the track stretches on and on in its direct unswerving course, with never a thrill, never a smile, unfaltering, unreflecting, mathematically.

What was the wife but the principal servant, or the eldest of the children? She only addressed her master with the most profound respect. “Sir,” she would say to him, or “My good friend.” She was his “wife and subject”; if she wrote to him she signed, “your humble obedient handmaid and friend.” But her husband spoke to her stick in hand.

The stick! that was the only argument the women understood.

Bon cheval, mauvais cheval, veut l’esperon, Bonne femme, mauvaise femme, veut le baston.[98]

Preachers spoke of the thrashings with a smile. Needless to say, the police did not interfere. Margaret of France did indeed think it a little vexatious that a lady honoured with the king’s attentions like the beautiful Madame de Chateaubriand should still receive correction of this sort under her husband’s roof-tree.

But this was not all: the authority of the husband was often coupled with the tyranny of the mother-in-law. The husband’s mother, especially if she was a widow, rendered life horribly galling and difficult.

On the other hand, the married woman, no matter to what lengths her husband might carry his ill-usage, knew well that there was no redress for her anywhere. Unhappy wives sometimes in the madness of despair fled from their homes in the most shocking plight, only to be remorselessly dragged back by their father, brother, or cousins, as a result of the appalling freemasonry between men. To rely on her own mother was out of the question for a wife; the two women belonged to two distinct houses, with a barrier, a great gulf fixed between them. In the early days of wedlock a husband, not to appear a tyrant, and because he was in no way inconvenienced, would allow his wife now and then to visit her mother; but he contrived that these visits became gradually rarer, and when he was not at home, a wife careful of her repose and dignity would never cross her mother’s threshold without first writing to him: “If it be your good pleasure, I would fain go.”

That was a woman’s life. As it was not all smiles and rosewater, there was good reason for marrying the girls off early, before they had learned to care one way or another, their equipment being a few simple maxims inculcating obedience, and some odds and ends of medical knowledge. Wives who owed their training to Vivès could not but be very unhappy, according to the principles of marriage held by Vivès himself. For Vivès not merely approved of early marriages, he was also one of those who believed that the wife was created for the husband, and an irresponsible and inferior being; he looked at the husband as someone to bring her out. Erasmus, Bouchet, Dolce himself, nay, everybody had much the same impression.

The supremacy of the husband was the sacred ark; bold indeed would be the person who dared lift a hand to it! So in modern times we have seen aesthetes, like Ruskin, capable of every possible audacity but that. Ruskin does not understand women, and yet he has gone out of his way to exalt their rôle in the world; but, as soon as he comes face to face with the husband, he loses countenance, his candour vanishes, his words become cold and colourless.

How is one to explain this singular phenomenon, that so many good and even generous-minded men, after expressing a heart-felt sympathy with the sufferings of women, after proclaiming their intelligence and their right to live, falter and hide their heads when the question of liberty at home is raised? It is not because they believe there is no more to be said. La Rochefoucauld declares that “there are few good wives but are tired of their calling,” to which it would be easy to reply, “There are few good wives whose calling is not tiring.” But what is to be done? No one is inclined to go like Plato to the root of the matter and suppress marriage altogether. Marriage obviously necessitates a husband; it is a vexatious, clogging, disagreeable necessity, maybe, but there are no visible means of escaping it. A wife too is necessary; well, once a man and woman are united in wedlock, one of the two must needs hold the reins. There are many reasons, even physical ones, why a woman should not undertake to earn bread for the family and to flog the husband. And so the husband retains that right.

But if we go a little deeper into the psychology of domestic life in the sixteenth century, we shall note other important phenomena, pointing to a different conclusion.

To begin with, investigating facts from the outside, who was it that complained of marriage? The man; always the man. In actual working the woman found compensations, or at least advantages in it. For her it was a state leading to boundless possibilities if only she cared to open the door. The more ardent paladins of feminism, indeed, were often disconcerted by her outwardly conciliatory attitude towards it. But the husband, married though he was, could not forget that setting up an establishment had involved the turning his back upon life. His chains appeared to him, if not heavy (to him they were not heavy), at any rate the sign of a monotonous, unvarying servitude. In the words of an old ballad, the monk may change his order, the canon his stall, the official his functions,

But we that be poor married men Can neither go up nor down.

If we enquire of the spouses themselves, we find that the disagreements and difficulties rarely sprang from the larger facts—those that were regarded as irreparable.

Heaven seems to have taken care to arm us, in regard to important questions, with a veritable long-suffering. There are fools, it is true, who seriously think of keeping their wives under lock and key, not reflecting that no better means could be devised for making them desperate and leaving them at the mercy of Tom, Dick or Harry—the first passing officer. Such men only get their deserts. But there are also shrewd men who keep their eyes shut to what it is best not to see: everybody advises them to do so, or, what is better, gives them every assistance. There must be a special providence, even, watching over the wives.[99] A wife, on the contrary, can hardly remain in ignorance of her husband’s laxities, for these most often manifest themselves in the broad daylight, and sometimes under his own roof. Many stories might be told about chambermaids such as we read of in Scripture, but a little too mercenary, to be sure: for the courts showed so much generosity in assessing the damages due in such circumstances that artless little Chloes have been known to bamboozle the judges and profit handsomely by a mishap that was wholly imaginary.

In Italy, men of the world had a sure and simple custom, which consisted merely in buying a young slave-girl. In the market of Venice, a pretty Russian, a fair Circassian, a well-built Tartar girl between twenty-five and thirty years of age would fetch from six to eighty-seven ducats. It needs no showing how well this institution was suited to platonism; the most eminent platonists did not disdain it. The mother of Carlo de’ Medici was a lovely Circassian girl, purchased in this way by the grave and aesthetic Cosimo. It would never have occurred to a wife to desert her home for such a grievance as this; to do so would have made her a general laughing-stock. She might feel keen inward suffering; perhaps her heart would close a little more towards the earth and open out towards heaven; but this experience would be of use to her, and a woman who was genuinely an idealist would almost rejoice at it. It would teach her to show a firm and lofty front to the world, to live among her ideals, to form a low estimate of men.

Domestic quarrels really spring from the crabbed sour virtues, the insufferable respectabilities. Men are hard to please. One moment they find a wife in the way: the next they expect her to be perfect. She ought every morning, as an old author explains, to put on the slippers of humility, the shift of decorum, the corset of chastity, the garters of steadfastness, the pins of patience, and so on; but it is by no means proved that in such a case a husband would not think his wife a little over-dressed.

The wife, too, is up in arms about mere trifles—her husband’s commonplace soul, his narrowness, his materialism, his egotism, his gross old-bachelor ways. Her real grievances, to say nothing of her fancied ones, are innumerable. One woman finds, instead of the “morning dew” of her dreams, that she has espoused a lumpish lout.[100] Another, brought up in a part of the country where hunting was the stock topic of conversation, feels aggrieved if her husband tries to engage her practical interest in literature or music, the result of which is so complete a discord that the husband at last packs her off to her father, who promptly sends her back again. Another lady is wretched because her good man loses his appetite, and in bed does nothing but sigh; on this foundation she builds a whole world of suppositions, and finishes by making life impossible to the poor man, who is all the time at a loss to know why: as a matter of fact, he has been worried about an investment. There are some women odious because of their incessant chattering, their tempers, their vanity. Many women are desperately fond of contradicting their husbands, tormenting them with pin-pricks. At table a husband inadvertently poured water into his wife’s glass. The lady handed the glass to a footman, saying hotly: “When it is dry, I will ask for it back.”[101] These are the things which destroy domestic happiness, which poison a man’s life (“wine and women have their poison,” says an old proverb), which disgust and shrivel the heart of a woman and drive her to a life away from her home, in pilgrimages or what not. A man does not need to be a saint to bear with a woman of easy virtue, but only a saint can endure a wearing woman.

And so what is wanted in domestic life is a great deal of prudence and wisdom, and as little as possible of illusions and passion. Marriage is the most sacred bond in the world, but only so long as it is not strained. To yield to the temptation of loving would be fraught with great peril; that is the forbidden fruit. Champier, a philosophical physician of the time, calls it fatal: it kills. Leaving out of account the physical vicissitudes of life, the spirit of man is too fickle to permit him safely to stake his life on one head.[102] Of this, Europe had a terrifying proof.

Philip the Fair was a notorious lady-killer; and his wife Joanna, like a genuine Spaniard, loved him to distraction. On one occasion when he was travelling in the Netherlands, she worried herself into a sort of prostration. One wild, bitter night, as November nights are in Navarre, this poor Joanna, seized with a sudden hallucination, rushed out half-clad into the courtyard of the castle of Medina del Campo. People hurried up to her, and the governor stopped her and ordered the gate to be shut; but the unhappy woman, her eyes starting from her head, clung to the gate, and no human strength could tear her away. When morning came she was still there, panting and shivering, with wild, sunken eyes. Her mother, Queen Isabella, who was lying ill at Segovia, despatched an admiral and an archbishop in hot haste to the castle, but neither the archbishop nor the admiral succeeded in getting the poor mad thing away from her gate. They only managed, with great difficulty, to induce her to enter an adjacent shelter for the following night. Only the Queen was able to put an end to this distressing scene, the memory of which thrills Spain to this day. Yes, La Bruyère has well said: “Women go to extremes! They are better or worse than we.” There lies their danger. They would assuredly do well to beware of their ecstasies, and to keep above or below the husband with whom it is their lot to live.

If they are reasonable and resigned, like those of whom we have to speak, not believing in the necessity of a matrimonial passion, then the humanists resume their dulcet strains. They have no intention of bringing about a violent rupture, but make their appeal to finesse.

The old type of the hectoring husband, even with his bludgeon, is no longer a terror. No one is so likely to play a puppet’s part as the man who fancies he is monarch of all he surveys. The foolish fellow is so convinced of his superiority that he never perceives the slender cords by which he is led. He works like an ox,[103] and his wife calls him a selfish beast and curmudgeon. She croaks of the workhouse if things are not going well with him, while if everything is going smoothly she “cockers and cossets him,” and then gets, not a beating, but a dress or a blouse. She has tears or smiles as occasion serves, and, if need be, practises her blandishments on the friends of the dear man. She wheedles even Heaven itself, for all that is required to ensure peace is to bring the shirt that her lord and master is to wear on Sunday into contact with the altar during Friday’s mass, and there is no difficulty in that. It is commonly said that “a woman is easy to manage provided ’tis a man that takes the trouble”; a man is still easier to manage provided a woman is good enough to take him in hand. In short, the women had long before this quietly juggled away this harassing domestic problem. That is why, despite the bogey of principles, the women thought highly of marriage. They reconciled themselves to obedience, so long as they did not obey. For the same reason the warmest friends of women found no better means of combating marriage than to defend it. The men alone girded at it, because, accustomed in their bachelor days to eat their own cake, they did not easily get into the habit of working for a little community.

Erasmus has very cleverly summed up the situation in the form of a dialogue between a young bride and a matron of sense and sobriety.[104]

The former makes loud outcry. “What a hell is marriage!” she exclaims, “what a slave’s business! And for whom, ye gods! For a gambler, a brute, a rake! ’Twould be better far to sleep with a pig!”

The other soothes her. She must take her husband as she finds him, that is to say, a coarse animal, a sort of elephant, to be tamed with a lump of sugar.[105] She must appear to give in to him about trifles, to put up with some of his whims and eccentricities, and above all to lay in a large stock of good temper and never be idle or dull, for the husband has a perfect horror of being bored, perhaps because he is such a bore himself, and sulkiness upsets him, especially if he is sulky. What she must do is to leave him what he has, and give him what he lacks, those charming possessions with which the new system of civilisation has endowed women. She may even add a little affection, and then, one fine day, she will be struck with astonishment (for men do not shine at finesse) to see this rough husband of hers at her feet, and, instead of considering her a nonentity, taking her for the image of God. From that moment she possesses the affection she has sought; and the task is not very difficult.

Truth compels us to add, however, that, apart from this moral recipe, another circumstance contributed to give the women greater importance in conjugal life. In France, as in every country where men are the ruling spirits, they were not fond of giving the girls a dowry, or at all events they gave them the smallest possible allowance. When the girls married, they received a sum representing in a way what would some years before have been called their “night-cap,” but what was then styled a “chaplet of roses,” and they renounced all claim on the inheritance. Accordingly a rich man did not think it at all extraordinary to wed a girl without a fortune, since that was the usual thing. Louis de la Trémoille married Gabrielle de Bourbon on those terms. Further, there was not the same difference between large, middling and small fortunes as there is to-day. With an income of three or four thousand livres, equal to £3000 or £4000 to-day, a man was thought a nabob. The husband, then, brought the money, and in addition he guaranteed a contingent jointure on his own property, so that it was really a home of his providing that the woman entered. A man in those days knew nothing of that pride now universally felt in wedding a millionaire’s daughter from Cincinnati, or even from Paris.

To marry money struck people as shameful, almost infamous. A husband supported on his wife’s income was the object of heartfelt commiseration, and an establishment so organised seemed unworthy of the name. No sarcasm was keen enough for the classical “son-in-law of Monsieur Poirier,”[106] the dapper lordling, all genealogy and sport, whose sole accomplishment is a knack of plunging deep into debt, from which his worthy father-in-law (who made his money in treacle) toils behind the scenes to extricate him.

On the contrary, Monsieur Poirier was highly esteemed in industrial countries—the Low Countries, for example, while as to the Italians, they, openly and unashamed, regarded big dowries as at once legitimate and desirable. They had the courage of their opinion—for instance, that physician of Pistoja who had to choose between two girls, one of whom was warranted a sensible creature, while the other was less sensible, but richer by three hundred crowns. The doctor did not hesitate an instant in choosing the richer, for in his opinion the risks were equal, and the difference pointed out between them was not worth a few crowns. No Italian was at all loth to marry a woman who brought him a dowry large enough to live on. At Florence fifty crowns a year would almost keep a household of moderate tastes, and a woman of the lower middle-class as a rule received a dowry of two or three thousand florins, which yielded an income of at least a hundred and fifty florins. The Visconti and the Sforza, by means of dowries which were by all accounts colossal, got their daughters into the principal royal houses of Europe. In short, the Italian system continued to exercise a wonderful fascination even over outsiders, and in starting on the expeditions to Italy more than one French noble fancied that a rich wife would be the reward of his prowess.

It is not very surprising that these ideas at length overcame all resistance in France. Louis XI., who was a pupil of the Sforza, did much in this as in other things to snap the chains of the old traditions. We have elsewhere related how lightheartedly he made and unmade marriages, with the sole object of rewarding various adventurers at the expense of the most honourable families.

Louis XII., on the contrary, set himself passionately to oppose these new manners. Although he plumed himself on his chivalry as much as anyone, he did not admit that the heat of passion could excuse the abduction of a young girl, even if she were rich—and in such cases she was almost always rich. His firmness did not prevent some picturesque exploits; but the authority of the church, with its strong weapon the canon laws, lent him aid.

We have moreover had occasion to show elsewhere how much difficulty Charles VIII. had, after the event, in getting the legitimacy of his marriage with the heiress of Brittany acknowledged.[107]

And so it is that, at the epoch of women’s triumph, we find in France two distinct species of husbands. The first, without shutting their eyes to the importance of money, refused to make it the principal question in marriage. Undoubtedly it was unfortunate if the wife came quite empty-handed, and in such a case a girl ran some risk of the “pain” of remaining an old maid or falling into an unhappy plight. The most insignificant workgirl set her heart on getting a little dower together, even by methods not altogether innocent,[108] and we know that the purses of princesses dribbled out a beneficent response to this desire. But many marrying men were quite content to be fobbed off with some sort of equivalent. Thus Louis XII. created François de Melun Count of Epinay to induce him to marry Louise de Foix; and Louis de la Trémoille gave twelve hundred livres to his servant, Robert Suriete, to compensate him for the portionless condition of a pretty girl, Marie de Briethe.

The other kind of husband, which was destined more and more to outnumber the first, saw in money, on the contrary, the real, substantial element of wedlock. Anyone who thought that a woman would appreciate a sacrifice made to marry her struck them as egregiously simple. The richer women are, the better they are, as Montaigne says: there is no reason why a man should sacrifice positive “commodities” to uncertain (and not particularly useful) quantities such as birth, beauty, virtue, wit.

The ball once set rolling spun along merrily. Especially in Italy, the exploitation of marriage attained imposing proportions. Indignant fathers of families protested; the Venetian senate, composed mainly of fathers, passed various decrees more and more restrictive, contemptuous and scathing, but all in vain. The whole class of idle young men of fashion, and it was a numerous one, avowedly regarded marriage as a unique means of enriching themselves and assuring an idle life, a charmingly easy means, too, not above the level of the meanest intelligence. Guez de Balsac likened it to a fat prebend which does not require the holder to become actually a canon, but which does unhappily necessitate occasional residence.

This custom does not perhaps indicate very warm feelings on the part of the young men, but it cannot be denied that it satisfied the secret wishes of the women and gave a sanction to the evolution of their ideas.

From the day when they pay the household expenses, women consider the parts reversed, and begin by assuming the most perfect liberty. Henceforth no more constraint, no more subterfuges, no more Judas kisses. They are now, mark you, equal[109] or superior to their husband in those material concerns which are the essence of domesticity; and as moreover they fancy that morally they excel the men, that they are at once more affectionate, more chaste and more steadfast; as they are reminded on all sides of the example of paragons like Cleopatra, they make up their minds to be Cleopatras too. They consent, out of goodness of soul, to try their prentice hand on their husbands. They make him happy, sometimes even in his own despite; they are going to transform him “from a battered ingot or a base coin into a new crown piece.” In his heart of hearts the husband may fret and fume, call to mind the old-time ways, wonder at his wife’s continual absences from home and her choice of friends, and at times even try to interfere; but he is quickly given to understand that my lady is not going to be held in a leash or shut up in a band-box, that seraglios exist no longer. She will devote herself to his happiness, provided he shows himself docile and recognises his incapacity and helplessness. Ay, and let him reflect: how could he get on without so virtuous a wife? He would go into a consumption. She is there, regulating his expenses, his pleasures, the frets and sallies of his temperament; she watches like a sister of mercy over his physical and moral well-being, and it is by this means that the household represents henceforth a unity, sound, robust, with two bodies, four arms, and two souls.

Obviously (to repeat it once more), we have no intention of enunciating an absolute rule. In speaking of households, we do not mean that all the households in France were cast in the same mould, and that everywhere at the same moment they were all acting precisely in the same way. No two were alike.

The truth is that, one way or another, a very large number of women no longer suffered themselves to be snuffed out, “trodden under foot,” to use the current phrase. As to the manner in which their controlling influence showed itself, that depended on events, tastes, how the wind blew, circumstances. A favourite idea of Margaret of France, and one which it would have been difficult to get out of her head, was that women always err by their meek and quiet spirit, their excess of long-suffering. In vain is the reply made that more than one woman makes a virtue of necessity, and that, face to face with a violent creature threatening to break every bone in her body, a woman needs all her patience; Margaret protests that she would rather be flogged than despised. This magnificent declaration sets some of the company smiling, and enraptures the women. One pert widow alleges that she loved her husband so much that if he had beaten her she would have killed him. “In other words,” retorts Henri d’Albret, “you mean to rule the roost. Well, I am agreeable, but you would have to get all the husbands to agree.” Margaret winces under this intellectual cut; she is put out, for natural as she would regard it for her husband to take her orders, she dares not say so. Even she falters, and admits that the man is the natural head, but not that he has a right to desert or maltreat his wife.[110] Can this be Margaret? Yes, the words are her own, and are exactly to the point. Women do lack decision—and she was the very first to show it!

Some young ladies, to elude this difficulty, thought it well to marry a ninny—if not an absolute fool. Worthy folk were amazed and sang the praises of mind and its attractions, “the treasures of knowledge,” and asked them what pleasure they promised themselves. What a question to ask! Why, since a husband was in question, they promised themselves precisely no pleasure; nothing but money, or a name! That was how the Duchess of Medina-Sidonia married; she espoused an income of sixty-thousand ducats, with a grandee of Spain. True, this grandee, when paying a visit to the archbishop, asked very politely to see the children! There was nothing here to hinder the duchess from having as much mind as she wanted. But it must be confessed that this was an extreme remedy, and it would be preferable for a woman to feel and believe herself able to mate with a man of intelligence.

Domestic manners thus underwent a profound transformation. In humble homes the wife continued perforce to cook, to make the beds, to wash her husband’s head and feet, with no loss of dignity. But in the great houses, it was no longer common to find hard inelegant matrons who rose with the sun, were continually chevying the children and servants, and knew no pleasure but the joy of piling up well-bleached and well-darned linen on Saturday, the housewife’s field-day. As Fourier has pointedly observed, disdain of such mole-eyed habits is the test of a people’s progress in civilisation.

It is much more delightful to float through life with a smile on the lips, and to govern imperceptibly, by means of a languorous Creole grace.

Such grace abounded, and many instances of it might be given. Here is a specimen which seems to us characteristic; it is a simple little note from Isabella d’Este[111] to her husband, dictated to a secretary:

“My Lord,

Prithee mock not at my letter, nor say that all women are poor things and ever smitten with fear, for the malignity of others far exceedeth my fear and your lordship’s mettle. I should have written this letter with my own hand, but ’tis so hot that, if it last, we are like to die. The little knave is very well and sendeth a kiss to your lordship, and as for me, I do ever commend myself to you.

Longing to see your lordship,

ISABELLA, with my own hand.”

Mantua, July 23rd.

“With my own hand,” the signature and no more. It is so hot! But does not this very air of fragility convey a charm exactly of the kind to subjugate even a husband?

This charm does enfold him—and it keeps husband and wife apart! Seen at a distance these distinguished women, genuinely Stoic at heart under a mask of _abandon_, in reality overawed their lords and masters, and, even in their private intercourse with them, kept themselves shrouded in mystery and the unknown. Vittoria Colonna’s husband, who took little pains to be agreeable at home,[112] became so devoted a lover of his lawful spouse when far away as to compose in her honour a whole volume of charming verses entitled _A Book of Loves_. This book was never published, and has disappeared. Brantôme keenly regrets its disappearance, because, he says, it would have given us an opportunity to see the poetry of conjugal love, and to know if that ought to draw its inspiration from platonic sentiments or not—from celestial love or from love legitimately terrestrial.

Poor Brantôme! We think we can solve the question which troubles him. The women of that time were waxing philosophic, they had set their minds towards acquiring a good deal of knowledge and yet remaining alive, instead of minimising themselves, humbling themselves, following behind like a boat in tow. They had become vestals (if we may put it thus) in regard to marriage, and considered that their true mission was to shed abroad the love which welled over from their quivering hearts; for it is always the lack of men that turns women into feminists. In the world they were going to become “goddesses,” and it would be impossible any longer to live without them.

Francis I., in a court without women, found himself getting too proud and despotic; his gardens appeared to him “flowerless,” so he summoned and enticed young women to him, and treated them “like goddesses in heaven.” He shewed them their new mission.

And yet, what unsuspected depths of loathing rose to the lips of those divine women! I do not know whether the number of women sick of their husbands was larger than at present, but it was large enough. Pride and a high sentiment of duty in the gaze of the world long watched over them, like those grand statues of splendid, almost menacing virtues which the sculptors of former days were fond of setting before a tomb, at either end of the grave. But after they had accomplished, unostentatiously, devotedly, the mission for which men married them, namely, kept the house in order, loyally studied the master’s comfort, poulticed and physicked him, borne him children, replenished the stock (pardon the expression) like good brood-mares, and humbly occupied the foot of the table, there came a time when this primary duty was done, and then they sprang up as though from a sleep, and looking at the sun, enquired of him whither they must fly to find life. They were born to sow flowers behind them. Their children were these flowers, painfully plucked out of their very vitals and flung into the future. It remained yet to pluck from their hearts, with a more vivifying joy, immaterial flowers, flowers of love, flowers of happiness, children of the soul, their real children, for if the woman is a passive being in physical conception, in spiritual conception she plays another part, she becomes the active being. The seed is hers to sow.

By this time they were no longer at the “angelic age,” as Alfred de Vigny called it, namely, fifteen years. As a rule, they might confess to thirty, the age when women have “a spice of the devil,” the age at which one ought to know how to deal with soul and heart.

The sort of revolution they brought about was no new thing. There always had been and always will be women of thirty years, quite aware of their age; but these were in addition keen-sighted, psychological women, who meant to get to the bottom of the phenomenon and measure its intensity with the eye of a connoisseur, for it seemed to them that they were entering into life.

The children, who had been the _raison d’être_ of the home, were about to go out into the world, or had already gone. As soon as he could, the first-born son, that dear little boy whom the mother loved, asked and obtained a little money and disappeared. Henceforth he was hardly mentioned; he now had his own affairs, his own pleasures, and when he wrote it would be a postscript, affectionate but rather concise: “Madam, I had forgotten to write and say I have learnt that you have given me a little brother named Guy. I beseech you, Madam, see him well nourished, for I love him well.” Sometimes news came that, far away, Death had rudely snapped the last remaining tie, and from the truly heroic words which then burst from certain courageous mothers’ hearts, we see how hardened their souls had become, and how the noblest and most dearly loved of them had been compelled, in their thorny life, to form the painful but admirable habit of sacrificing their affections to the very uttermost. Gabrielle de Bourbon was announcing to her officers the death of her only son, killed at Marignan. Aloud she said: “in this battle that the King has won”; but in a whisper she added: “which has brought such heavy woe upon us.”

That sweet women whose very nature is to love should go out, when all fails them thus, into the world, like the bees of God, to gather a little honey and labour for the common hive, is not very surprising. They prefer “a little love from many to a great deal from one,”[113]—especially when that one does not love them!

And so marriage comes to serve them as a refuge when on their honey-quest. It is like the lodge in which hunters take up their quarters, to be nearer their game and to shelter themselves from the weather. The women rejoice at having it. Nevertheless, before studying these emancipated women as they play their part manlike away from home, we have still to examine a final objection of principle, which was strong enough to hold some of them back.

Many moralists, even without bias against feminism, reproach the women with owing their philanthropy to a horror of marriage; according to them, the mission to the world upon which the women wished to enter was for them a means of evading their domestic duties.

That is not the fact. Without appealing to the obvious arguments, we wish for no other proof of the women’s good intentions than their very manifest desire not to carry their separation from their husbands beyond a certain point. They did mean to render their bonds lighter, and even elastic. But, as we have already seen, they defended the institution of marriage and affectionately tended their husbands in sickness; and it is certain that they had no wish to lose them.

Divorce originated in the masculine countries. It appeared a step in advance, because hitherto public opinion had shown itself singularly cruel in regard to separated wives. There was neither pity nor justice for them. The husband had no shame in deserting his wife, and it was always she who was blamed.

To put a stop to separations, the Senate of Venice, evidently convinced that as men they were not there for nothing, prescribed in 1543 a system which was simplicity itself. All separated women were metaphorically to be buried in a heap; they were forced to wear a special costume like lepers, and were forbidden access to any public place. The clergy revolted. In the end, the august Senate contented itself with a milder punishment; it placed the unfortunate women under the surveillance, not of the state police, but of their ex-husbands.

But a time came when the Venetian measures no longer appeared feasible, and then in the countries where men ruled opinion it was generally admitted that woman, being a secondary creature, needed an owner and employer. Instead of trampling upon her when she found herself without a master, they deigned to do her so much justice as to provide her with a new lord. Calvin, generous soul, permitted her, in case of proved desertion, to take another mate.

In the Roman countries, deserted wives were objects of compassion. But marriage remained indissoluble; there was no remarriage; and a woman in a country where women were a force had nothing to gain by placing herself in a false position. All that Roman charity could do was to throw open houses of refuge where she might find a retreat in honour and solitude. The true way of getting rid of a husband was to keep him.

Nor did the women, even the more philosophic of them, find any substantial advantage in being widows.

Certainly we must make some deductions from the rather theatrical demonstrations customary at death-beds. The custom was an old one, dating from the time when it was agreed that in losing her master a woman lost her all; these poor women were stricken to the heart-core, and thrilled with an emotion half comic, half touching. That was their manner of receiving their liberty; it seemed as though they had nothing left them but to die themselves, especially if they were young, and for some time everyone seemed of that opinion. In lugubrious and lachrymose tones their friends would remind them of overpoweringly wonderful examples: Artemisia, who drank her husband’s ashes in a cup of water; Portia, Cato’s daughter and wife of Brutus, who, on learning of her husband’s death, finding no knife at hand, did not seek one but swallowed live coals. Those who had simply opened a vein or cut their throat, or who had without ado plunged a dagger in their heart, were past numbering. We can realise what delicacy, what aristocratic charm there was in the Indian widow’s suttee.

But for her children, who after reconciling her to marriage reconciled her to life, Louise of Savoy would have died on the corpse of her husband; so, at least, Jean de Saint-Gelais, her chamberlain, assures us, and he was suspected, only too reasonably, of over-familiarity with the secret tastes of his mistress. But for her religious scruples the beautiful Isabella Richisentia had killed herself on the body of Raymond de Cardoña.[114] Bouchet and Moncetto, nicknamed Lycurgus, deliberated in great distress of mind whether they should persuade Mary of England[115] to live, after the death of Louis XII.; they reminded her of Lucrece, Penelope and others, and Moncetto wore himself out in speaking of them to her in every known language and in verse. But for the young Englishman she espoused only a fortnight later, Mary, perhaps, would have died.

As a rule these widows, like reasonable creatures, at last made up their minds to live, under pressure from those about them; but it was also customary for them to display at least gorgeous mourning finery.[116]

Let us first see how they buried their husbands.

There were quiet women like Anne of France who contented themselves with the celebration of a very impressive service, and to all appearance shed no tears, for they spoke neither of drinking the powdered bones of the dead man nor of spending the rest of their life in the bed of the dear departed. Anne of France indeed considered these proceedings as “useless, unworthy and detestable follies”; the only mourning that appealed to her was simple, silent and lasting. But more than once people were staggered at the quantity of tears women’s eyes could contain. “Vainly do they tear their cheeks and dishevel their hair; I go off and enquire of a chambermaid or of a secretary how they were, how they lived together. We would much rather they laughed at our death, if they would but smile on us while we live.”[117]

A Spanish lady, the Countess of Consentana, in officially notifying her vassals of the death of her husband, signed herself, “The sad and unfortunate countess,” and, the better to indicate her distress, she dropped two ink-blots where her name should have come. The facetious vassals replied to their “sad and more than very unfortunate countess” in an address which, in their agitation, they all signed with enormous daubs and flourishes. Spain smiled, from Bilbao to Gibraltar.

So a widow left nothing undone to show how much she deplored her solitary condition. To this first conclusion we must add a second not less manifest: almost every widow strove earnestly to regard her husband as alive, so true is it that her aim was to act under the shadow of a husband as little in her way as she in his.

Of all the species of husbands, the dead husband is the one who would require the most special monograph. However little heroic his life may have been, his widow made it her business to sing his praises in public. A woman whose married life had notoriously been one of discreet indifference, if not of discord, would spend her nights and days in celebrating the glory and the memory of the dead man. So profoundly would she identify herself with him in heart that ere long she would develop into the widow of a great man and rise into a superior atmosphere. The greatnesses which the deceased perhaps never possessed she first gave him and then appropriated herself, and in the fire of this love she was gradually consumed. Besides, sometimes she happened actually to have got past the age for love.

Margaret of France consoled herself frankly enough for the loss of the Duke of Alençon; but Vittoria Colonna never ceased to address sonnets to her captain, and when she was urged to marry again, her reply was simple: “My husband Ferdinand, who to you seems dead, is not dead to me.” Diana of Poitiers manipulated this principle of “beyond the grave” with wonderful dexterity: she never was a widow. Her husband was dead, to be sure, but she displayed as her device an evergreen tree-stem springing from a tomb, with the words: “Left alone, she lives in him.” As late as 1558, at the moment of her greatest worldly triumphs, she remained faithful to him.

Here, then, we have reached a second and a very important point: a woman of the world, so to speak, had her husband’s soul packed in straw (like her china), and in principle she always considered herself as a wife.

In regard to the employment of their widowhood the widows fall into two classes. First there was the widow of the classical traditional school, who no longer belonged to the world, but buried herself in her maternal duties or in charitable work. She was only a survival of the old-style housewife, of whom a good many were produced even in the sixteenth century. For example there was Anne of Polignac, who, in her retreat at Verteuil, where she divided her time between her children and a splendid library, amazed the Emperor Charles V. with her well-regulated and dignified life. Again, there was Charlotte d’Albret, the widow of Caesar Borgia; she was a little more worldly, and by nature fond of show, splendid plate, magnificent jewels, and a large retinue.

These widows were administrators of the first order; so far as the interests of the family were concerned, it was an advantage, as a proverb ran, “for the husband to go first to earth.” They excelled in getting full value for their money; sometimes even they were not averse to dabbling in usury: Charlotte d’Albret rather liked it. It would certainly not have been safe to reckon on their alleged feebleness; some of them were of mettle enough to mount the ramparts like Catherine Sforza. After the death of Grisegonelle Frottier, various relatives of his conspired to capture by force of arms the manor of Blanc which belonged to him. His widow, Françoise d’Amboise, learning of their plot, immediately appealed to the “picaulx,” a brotherhood of Poitevin knights who were vowed to protect widows and orphans; and instead of leaving her cause to the halting march of justice, she organised an expedition and overthrew her adversaries. In spite of the rather energetic character of the proceeding, Louis XI. was touched, and willingly gave his pardon.

The most of these good widows spent a part of their life in convent chapels, and it was in this direction that a breach was made in their spirit of economy, for, according to pious authors, the devil worms his way through the vestry door. They would meet there a lay brother, charged with the duty of nurturing simple souls into fruitfulness. Beginning by sending some delicious tarts in exchange for a _De Profundis_, the ladies would by degrees make up their minds to found a chapel, then to have it decorated, then to endow it.

Or they received charming letters from the good nuns: “We are poor women whom your departure has left in distress, and we may say that we have lost all the good of life.... We are still wearing the cloaks you made for us, and we are going without pelisses, as our custom is. The convent has not changed since you left us ... except it be that we suffer cruelly from cold during the winter.”[118]

Many grave and strong-minded widows, after having mingled in affairs, took advantage of their widowhood only to forget a world in which their heart had not found sustenance. So soon as they had fulfilled unavoidable duties, it was a pleasure to them to distribute their property and retire from the world. We can hardly realise how the vision of a few sweet, peaceful years consecrated to the soul haunted the hearts of women whom the evil star of too high birth had flung into political affairs.

Such was the end Margaret of Austria[119] would have desired.

Such was actually the end of two exquisite princesses of the house of Lorraine: Margaret of Lorraine, duchess of Alençon, who first connected herself with a hospital, then with the strict order of the Poor Clares; and Philippa of Gueldres, who entered the same sisterhood when her son ascended the throne. She lived with them for twenty-seven years in the deepest humility, styling herself “a worm of the soil,” though her companions might continue to call her “our reverend Mother the Queen.”

The new generation was to see little of these sublime modesties. The majority of widows lived in the world; but what liberty they enjoyed they bought very dear, and on the whole they had less liberty than wives. They were gay and did not darken too often the vestry-door; they did not flaunt the time-honoured widow’s cap, still dear to Englishwomen—headgear that would disgust anybody with widowhood. Was that a crime? By no means; and yet the slightest slip or suspicion of a slip was in them unpardonable. Men saw in every widow either a naughty woman or a hypocrite, and they did not shrink from saying so. A physician was once bargaining for a mule in the presence of a fair widow, and said he: “I want one that’s a widow”: and as the dealer did not understand him, he added: “Yes, a widow, that is, plump, and light on her heels, and a good feeder.” The saying ran: “If a man thinks his wife a little too thin, he had better make her a widow.” A widow was regarded only as so much raw material; and from the moment when “Goodman Danger” was no longer at hand, sin itself seemed to lose its sweetness. Widows were recommended to frequent none but deserted chapels, to contemplate the crucifix during the night. This condescending pity sprang sometimes from good-heartedness; but it was often odious to them, and all the more so because everyone, even the most confidential servants, fancied they had a right to throw in their sympathetic suggestions. Anne of France was indignant at this universal treason, which shocked her sense of right.[120]

And yet society added one more tyranny. For a widow to marry again was scarcely tolerated.[121] She would have been just as severely chided for finding a second husband as she would have been for not finding a first.[122] She would be sooner forgiven for a frailty, a yielding to temptation, than for contracting a new tie. What woman was this who had not had too much of one husband, and was not amply satisfied? Among the people she was favoured with a sort of skimmington ride. Margaret of France defied the prejudice and married again: it was in sooth the deed of a philosophic woman. But in general, widows were still chained to their widowhood by various considerations; in the first place, the practical difficulty of finding another husband. Men were quite ready to court a widow, but very few would make the sacrifice involved in marrying her. A woman no longer young, a “shelled peascod,” who no longer had anything to give and had settled habits of her own, was the antipodes of the little maiden of twelve so much in request. Besides, the widow herself was enjoying a large and tranquil life, thanks to the jointure of which a second marriage would deprive her; sometimes the whole of her husband’s fortune had come to her on condition that she devoted herself to the children. She held in all matters the authority which had belonged to the dead man, and indeed it was not uncommon for the husband expressly to bequeath her this authority in his will.[123] The drawback to this life of business management is precisely that a woman loses in it something of the bloom of her grace and sweetness, she no longer needs to employ persuasiveness and love since she has force at her disposal, and the result is that she becomes a sort of man, and acquires some of the defects by which she has suffered at the hands of her husband. We can thus understand quite well that a woman who wishes to remain a woman will do her best, for her own security and charm’s sake, to live under the fostering wing of a precious memory, and will cherish with the utmost devotion her (so to speak) posthumous husband. There lies her real strength.

The Renaissance woman, then, a woman of essentially fine grain, and well versed in everything it was her business to know, was a woman of absolute sincerity, and we must believe her when she speaks well of marriage. She considered that institution as perfectly reconcilable with the fulfilment of a mission in the world, indeed as favourable, almost indispensable, to it. She had no more reason to give up marriage than to give up eating and drinking: it is not this that enchains the soul. The idealists differed from the utilitarians solely in the belief that one marriage is enough: the former covered their faces if a widow, not ethereal enough to satisfy them, went by on the arm of a new husband; the latter applauded, and fancied that by this transaction the animal nature was held in check. But this is of little interest to us. The only result important to note is that a woman, without ceasing to be a woman, could win freedom for her affections and her activities as well as a man. When she had attained that condition of liberty, she ascribed all the honour to marriage, and blessed it instead of thinking that she owed everything to herself. Marriage, like many human inventions, is a contrivance capable of producing either liberty or tyranny, and women had simply altered its direction.

They wielded intimate and domestic powers. Their rival was not the husband, they came to terms with him; it was the man who looked after their body or their soul, and to whom, out of weakness or indolence, they were led to attach themselves like an anaemic ivy-plant. To mark their place in this world they had themselves to learn how to obtain what brings happiness: health of body and of soul. Respected in regard to the body, it remained for them to gain self-respect in regard to the soul, and to show that true Christianity consists in bestowing power and liberty, not in withdrawing them.

BOOK II. LIFE IN THE WORLD