Women are magicians. No wonder they were burned as witches in the Middle Ages.
NATIONALITY AND LOVE
Romantic love—commonly considered immutable—not only displays countless individual variations in regard to duration and degrees of intensity, but has a sort of “local colour” in each country; or, to keep up our old metaphor, a varying clangtint, depending on the greater or less prominence of certain “overtones.”
To describe all these varieties of Love would require a separate volume. And since all the most interesting forms of the romantic passion are to be met with in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, and America, it will suffice to briefly characterise Love in those countries.
FRENCH LOVE
As literary luck would have it, the subject of French Love follows naturally upon the subject of the last chapter, the Remedia Amoris.
The French are too clever a nation to leave to individual effort the difficult task of curing the mind of such an obstinate thing as Love. All the papas and mammas in the land have put their heads together and devised two methods of killing Love wholesale, compared with which all the remedies named in the last chapter are mere fly-bites.
These two methods are Chaperonage and Parental Choice, as opposed to Courtship and Individual Sexual Selection.
Paradoxical as it may seem, there is in the midst of modern Europe a nation which, in the treatment of women, Love, and marriage, stands on the same low level of evolution as the ancient, mediæval, and Oriental nations.
This is not a theory, but a fact patent to all, and attested by the best English, German, and French authors.