DELIVERING THE POST
The French women of the people, however, unlovely to look upon, toil-worn, absorbed from childhood in petty economics, have little to tempt men outside of the home in which they reign, so for those that do return the problem ends. But it is an altogether different matter with the women of the leisure classes. The industrial women who have proved so competent in the positions occupied for centuries by men merely agitate the economic brain of France, but the future of the women of the upper strata of the bourgeoisie is shaking the very soul of the social psychologist.
II
At the outbreak of the war hundreds of girls belonging to the best families volunteered as nurses. Some quickly retired to committee work in disgust, or because their pampered bodies rebelled under the strain.
Others have never faltered, doing the most repulsive and arduous work day by day, close to the thunder of guns, or under the constant menace of the taube whose favorite quarry is the hospital full of ill and wounded, and of pretty women whose torn bodies even in imagination satisfy the perversities of German lust; but if they ever go home to rest it is under the peremptory orders of their médecin major, who has no use for shattered nervous systems these days.
While these girls may have lost their illusions a little earlier than they would in matrimony, the result is not as likely to affect the practical French mind toward the married state as it might that of the more romantic and self-deluding American or English woman. There is little doubt that they will marry if they can, for to marry and marry early has been for too many centuries a sort of religious duty with well-born French women to be eradicated by one war; and as they will meet in hospital wards many officers who might not otherwise cross their narrow paths, their chances, if the war ends soon enough, will be reasonably increased.
Moreover, many a man who was a confirmed bachelor will, after the acute discomfort of years of warfare, look upon the married state as a greater reward than the medals on his breast; and on the other hand many girls will be glad to marry men old enough to be a parent of the young husband they once dreamed of; for hardly since the Thirty Years' War will men when peace comes be so scarce and women so many.
There has even been talk from time to time of bringing the Koranic law across the Mediterranean and permitting each able-bodied Frenchman of any class to have three registered wives besides the one of his choice, the additional expense and responsibility being borne by the State.
But of all the countries in Europe polygamy is most unthinkable in France. The home is as perfected and as sacred an economic institution as the State. To reign over one of those important units, even if deep in the shadow of the expansive male, to maintain it on that high level of excellence which in the aggregate does so much to maintain France at the very apex of civilization, in spite of another code which shocks Anglo-Saxon morality—this, combined with the desire to gratify the profoundest instincts of woman, is the ambition of every well-conditioned French girl.
She would far rather, did the demand of the State for male children become imperative, give it one or more outside the law rather than forfeit her chance to find one day a real husband and to be a component part of that great national institution, The Family. She would not feel in the same class for a moment with the women who live to please men and refrain from justifying themselves by fulfilling at the same time a duty to their depleted State.