YOUNG FRANCE.
October 20. 1850. J
357
We should only like to see what a “prope*
gentlewoman ” in the “good society ” of France
in the present day would say to Mademoiselle
Jacqueline de Meurdrac!
Well, this youthful heroine resolved to live and die unmarried, and a brave cavalier of the name of La Guette, whose estate was not far from her father’s, swore to himself a solemn oath that he would confer his name upon no woman born. Somehow or other, the two met and — changed their minds. Jacqueline was eighteen, M. de la Guette eight-and- twenty, and he decided he would have no wife save Mademoiselle de Meurdrac, and she that she would have no husband save M. de la Guette. This being settled (which in those days surprised no one any more than the rest), Madame de Meurdrac was applied to, and gave her consent, and then came M. de Meurdrac to be spoken with. But it so happened that Etna and Vesuvius are not more volcanic than were M. de Meurdrac and M. de la Guette. The meeting took place one morning at breakfast.
“Monsieur,” said insinuatingly the young c&valier, “I have so much land, so many farms, and such and such sums in good shining crowns — I want to marry.”
“Then,” replied the future father-in-law, with a smile, “you must address yourself to the young lady you admire, or to her father.”
“You are he,” cried the suitor impatiently.
But the old gentleman took it all the wrong way.
“You no doubt fancy,” he exclaimed, “that because you are rich you can marry my daughter, but that is what I will not hear of — my daughter is not to be bought. ”
La Guette lost his breath and his pains in de- claring Jacqueline was resolved to be his wife. Old Meurdrac’s wrong-headedness would not be influenced; high words ensued; after high words came noisy deeds; crack went the plates at the walls, bang went the bottles on the floor; and when Jacqueline rushed in to quiet the irate couple, she found both in the act of drawing their swords. The girl instinctively seized a pistol, and the three glared angrily at each other, hesitating who should begin the fray. Madame de Meur- drac, at the head of all her servants, broke into the room, and by force of numbers the com- batants were disarmed, and the fiery demande en mariage of Mademoiselle Jacqueline was brought to a rather violent close.
Nevertheless, Jacqueline de Meurdrac had re- solved she would marry M. de la Guette, and none other; and so in the end marry him she did; and with him she went campaigning, having on one occasion served the Prince de Cond6 as aide-de- camp; and having accompanied him into the thick of the fire in an action on the banks of the Dor- dogne, during which his Royal Highness amused himself with more than once shouting:
“Come, gentlemen, make way for Madame de la Guette 1”
Our purpose, however, is not to write Jacqueline de Meurdrac’s biography, or that of any other French lady of note, but merely to show how different French manners and customs were amongst our neighbours to what they have now become. It is
praise to say of an English girl that she is “spirited
it is so difficult to apply the term to modern
French girls, that not very long since the
eldest son of a very illustrious house in France,
dutifully asking his mother whether it was “a
proper thing for ladies to ride on horseback?” (!)
received the following answer:
“It is a thing to be tolerated in certain cases — for instance, where health requires — but never to be encouraged!”
Compare a state of society where these words contain a truth, with that which is pre supposed by the good repute of a woman like Madame de la Guette; who, when she was presented to Queen Anne of Austria, after one of her warlike actions, received the compliments of the whole court on “her courage and brave bearing.”
The great question of education — what it makes of girls and boys, and men and women — is one that touches every country, and it has proved itself latterly to be one most nearly touching us. Let us reflect on what the daughters, sisters* wives of Englishmen have shown themselves to be in India. Let us count upon what the sons of such women will one day be, and glory in the thought that it is still a praise to say of an English girl that she is “high-spirited.”
This applies, too, in the same degree to the manly education of our boys; witness India, where no Englishman asked to be “defended ” or “fought for,” as Frenchmen invariably do on all occasions of trouble or revolt. We defended our- selves; and that we were able to do so— civilians equally with soldiers, women almost equally with men — depends upon our system of education, which is itself in turn dependent upon our social and political institutions, and upon our time- honoured manners and customs, far more than we are apt to think; and do not let us be unmindful of the saying of the Duke of Wellington upon the Eton play-ground: that it was “here we won the battle of Waterloo 1” If we needed a further proof of the superiority of our public-school edu- cation over that of France, we should find it in the impression produced by it upon one of the most distinguished and perhaps the most unpre- judiced of Frenchmen of our day — upon M. de Montalembert. In his volume upon “The Future of England,” if the writer’s own countrymen find set down what they most may envy, we find noted what we should most be proud of. We are forced into recognising as benefits to be preciously preserved, many things we had so long enjoyed that, unconscious of their immense value, we had accepted them as matters of course.
Let us, above all, hold to that wilful, generous, headstrong, bold, healthy, joyous animal — the true English “boy” — the boy “who bullied Keate,” as “Eothen ” somewhere says, but who rescues India; let him be a “boy,” not a lesser man, as he is in France; and, above all, let him “play ” too much, which no created being ever does in that country.
The muscular development and animal health of the French people is never on a level with our own, which disables them from supporting reverses or a protracted struggle with the patience and
energy which we display.