“I remember I was one day sitting in the Champs Elysées with two English ladies. Beside us was a young French girl with her father and mother. The person on the right of papa rose and went away, and we heard the young innocent say to her mother: ‘Mamma, may I go and sit by papa?’ It was a baby of about eighteen or twenty. Those English ladies laugh over the affair to this day.”
Boys suffer as well as girls. As the author of an article on “Parisian Psychology” remarks: “There are no mothers in France; it is a nation of ‘mammas,’ who, in the most unlimited sense of the word, spoil their boys, weaken them in body and soul, dwarf their thought, dry their hearts, and lower them to below even their own level, hoping thereby to rule over them through life, as they too often do. Frenchwomen having been at best but half-wives, regard their children as a sort of compensation for what they have themselves not had; and after the mischievous fashion of weak ‘mammas’ prolong babyhood till far into mature life.”
The French, in fact, are a nation of babies. Their puerile conceit, which prevents them from learning to read any language but their own, and thus finding out what other nations think of them, is responsible in part for the mediæval barbarism of their matrimonial arrangements. The Parisian is the most provincial animal in the world. In any other metropolis—be it London, New York, Vienna, or Berlin—people understand and relish whatever is good in literature, art, and life, be it English, American, French, German, or Italian. But the Parisian understands only what is narrowly and exclusively French. And this is the dictionary definition of Provincialism.
The consequences of this mediævalism and provincialism in modern France are thus eloquently summed up by a writer in the Westminster Review (1877):—
“Such education as girls receive is not only not a preparation for the wedded state, it is a positive disqualification for it. They are not taught to read, they are not taught to reason; they are launched into life without a single intellectual interest. The whole effort of their early training goes to fill their mind with puerilities and superstitions. As regards God, they are instructed to believe in relics and old bones; as regards man, they are instructed to believe in dress, in mannerisms, and coquetry. Their love of appreciation, after being enormously developed, is bottled up and tied down until a husband is found to draw the cork. What else, then, can we look for but an explosion of frivolity? Can we expect that such a provision of coquettishness will be reserved for the husband’s exclusive use? He will be tired of it in three months—unless it is tired of him before; and then the pent-up waters will forsake their narrow bed and overflow the country far and wide.”
No wonder Napoléon remarked that “Love does more harm than good.” And right he was, most emphatically, for the only kind of Love possible in France does infinite harm. It poisons life and literature alike.
We can now understand the fierceness of Dumas’s attacks on mariages de convenance: “The manifest deterioration of the race touches him; it does not touch us. Nor do we at all realise the next to impossibility of a man ever marrying for love in France. There are those who have tried to do it, but they can never get on in life; they are reputed of ‘bad example’” (St. James’s Gazette).
And now we come upon a paradox which has puzzled a great many thinkers. The Countess von Bothmer, while deploring the absence of Love in French courtship, endeavours to show that domestic happiness and conjugal affection are, nevertheless, not rare in France. French husbands “are ordinarily with their wives, accompany them wherever they can, and share their friendships and distractions.” Mr. Hamerton likewise bears witness that French girls “become excellent wives, faithful, orderly, dutiful, contented, and economical. They all either love their husbands, or conduct themselves as if they did so.” He says the notion fostered by novels “that Frenchmen are always occupied in making love to their neighbours’ wives” is nonsense; that there is no more adultery than elsewhere. “There exists in foreign countries, and especially in England, a belief that Frenchwomen are very generally adulteresses. The origin of the belief is this,— the manner in which marriages are generally managed in France leaves no room for interesting love-stories. Novelists and dramatists must find love-stories somewhere, and so they have to seek for them in illicit intrigues.”
This is all very ingenious, but the argument is not conclusive. Even granted for a moment that Mr. Hamerton is right in his defence of French conjugal life, is it not a more than sufficient condemnation of the French system of “courtship” that one-half of the nation are prevented from reading its literature because it is so foul and filthy—because Love has been made synonymous with adultery?
But Mr. Hamerton’s assertion loses its probability when viewed in the light of the following considerations. He himself admits that the French are anxious to read about Love, that the novelists and dramatists must find stories of Love somewhere—mind you, not of conjugal but of Romantic Love—and the Paris Figaro not long ago denounced the French novelists of the period for devoting their stories to Love almost exclusively, whereas Balzac, Dumas, Thackeray, and Scott, at least introduced various other matters of interest. Now French novels have the largest editions of any books published; and if so vast an interest is displayed by the French in reading about Love, is it likely that their interest is purely literary? Certainly not. They will seek it in real life. And in real life it can only be found in one sphere, which elsewhere is protected against such invasions, by the young being allowed to meet one another. “It is to be feared that they who marry where they do not love, will love where they do not marry.’”[marry.’”] In this respect human nature is the same the world over. The testimony of scores of unprejudiced authors on this head cannot be ignored.