356 ONCE A WEEK. [October 29, 1899.
“good society.” And at the bottom of all this
lies the one master circumstance of the mode of
transmission of property. The existence of the
eldest son, and future representative and head of
the family — let not our countrywomen forget it I
— makes the love-match necessarily the basis on
which the social edifice is raised. Subvert this,
and you must come to the money-marriage — the
so-called maria ge de convenance; and when you
have come to that, you have come to all that is
otherwise than as it should be in modem French
society. We will show this by example.
A father of a family has four sons, or two sons and two daughters, and is possessed of 2000/. sterling a year. He brings up his children in what abroad is termed great luxury. He has a handsome apartment in Paris, and what he styles a chateau down in some province, and his wife and his children have any number of fine dresses, and ride in comfortable carriages, go to operas and plays, and pass for very fine people altogether. One fine day the old gentleman dies, and then comes what is called the “division ” of everything he possessed. The house in the country is sold (mostly in very small parcels to forty or fifty proprietors); the horses and carriages are sold; the pictures, plate, furniture, wine — all is sold; and the very clothes the dead man last wore are disposed of for whatever they will fetch; * the pro- duce being shared to the minutest fraction among the survivors, who for the time cease to be sons and daughters, in order to become literally only “heirs. ”
All law expenses (which are very heavy) being discharged, each member of the family will begin by having about 450/. a year to spend. At the outset, the sons will think this a goodly sum, and they will begin by going on as they used to do when they had to partake of four times that amount. Nine times out of ten they commit some absurdity in the way of speculation, which reduces their income considerably, and then a “money-match ” has to be resorted to to set all square again; or else they prudently begin by looking out for the money-match, and proceed according to the rule recognised in France, that “a husband is worth at least three times the fortune he brings.’ * In either case, whether pre- ventively or curatively, the “money -match ” is made, and two separate fortunes are united with comparatively little attention to the tastes, habits, or affections of the two individuals possessing them.
With the daughters, supposing them to be still unmarried when they succeed to their fortunes, the “matching ” process is also instantly brought into play, and the ingenuity of every female rela- tive is forthwith exercised to obtain the best price for the orphans, and drive the hardest bargain with the future bridegrooms. Whatever obstacle may intervene (and never was a marriage in France which it was not sought by every imaginable means to prevent), these money-matches always
- There can be no moans of exaggerating the avidity that
is set forth on these sad occasions in France; and sons who h ive been the most submissive during a parent’s life will, at his death, haggle like Jews with their brethren over every threadbare raiment that may be left. They will have the value of everything up to the last peuny.
are somehow or other concluded — how to end, a
glance at French literature or the French stage
will quickly show.
But it cannot be otherwise. Marriages must be so concluded in France, because the unlimited subdivision of property makes it impossible that there should be a man who perpetuates “the family,” who is rich enough to buy his wife and not sell himself and whose exceptional condition forces his younger brothers to exert themselves, and be in turn thriving men, who, having made money, can afford to marry the women they love, and have chosen for their wives.
It is a recognised fact, to which we have alluded, that there are no girls in France. Why should there be? Where wives are chosen for their more or less of wealth, why should they trouble themselves to be attractive before mar- riage? They are so only after marriage, which they call freedom. To be married is, in France, to be free. Where money-matches are the basis on which the social edifice is raised, there can be no equivalent to what we are accustomed to in the shape of an English girl — a self-acting, sen- tient, responsible member of society, who chooses and is chosen, and who gives her hand only when her heart has preceded the gift.
It has become so proverbial that French girls are absolute nobodies, and only grow into some- bodies after they are married women, that it will, at first, be scarcely believed that a century and a half ago French girls were more independent, more self-reliant, than any English girl could be now. The “fastest ” young lady ever heard of in our isles would be distanced by the young ladies of the seventeenth century in France, and all the Hi Vernons and Kate Coventrys in Great Britain are boarding-school misses compared to the Marie de Hauteforts and the Jacqueline de Meurdracs of the days of the Fronde. Look at the Grande Mademoiselle who took the Bastille and besieged Orleans, and (leaving her aside, for she was, as a princess, exceptional) look at her fair aides-de- camp. We w'ilT, in order to convey a correct notion to our reader’s mind of what a French girl could be under the Regency of Anne of Austria, sketch out the life of Mademoiselle de Meurdrac, and show how what was in those days called a femme vaiUante astonished no one, and was, as we have said, far beyond anything that we imagine to ourselves as “fast.”
In 1612, a gentleman and his wife, in the pro- vince of Brie, close to Paris, lived in their ch&teau with their only child, Jacqueline. Monsieur and Madame de Meurdrac were by no means surprised that as the young lady grew up all she took to were masculine amusements. She tamed all the horses she could lay hands on, went out shooting with all the guns she could find, turned her neighbours’ daughters into bitter ridicule becauso they were “effeminate,” and was so adroit with her rapier that no cavalier within thirty miles cared to cross foils with her. Mademoiselle Jac- queline was a most “accomplished ” young person, handsome withal, and on all hands admitted to be the most desirable daughter-in-law that any proper gentlewoman with a son could possibly
find.