To us Frenchmen, woman is a being whom we consider greatly superior to ourselves, because we have made an ideal of her.
To the Englishman, woman is a creature whom he looks down upon as a frail and frivolous being, greatly inferior to himself. With what an air of sovereign condescension the English schoolboy tells his young girl friends all about the game of football or cricket, in which he has taken part! His manner seems to say: "Is it not awfully kind of me to take the trouble to enter into these details with poor, puny creatures like you, who cannot appreciate them?"
⁂
In France, whatever a woman does is right; even her errors almost turn to her advantage. If she breaks her marriage vows, it is not she who is covered with shame, it is her husband who is covered with ridicule; and people immediately look for defects in him, and excuses for her.
A society thus governed by women may lack firmness, but its salient points are sure to be good taste, delicacy, tact, wit, and amiability.
It is impossible not to mention here the ascendancy which women took over French literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and during the early part of the present one, through the influence of the salons littéraires. Does it not seem, in fact, as if the history of French literature might be summed up by naming the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and the salons of Mme. des Loges, Mlle. de Scudéry, Mme. de Sablé, Ninon de Lenclos, Mme. Scarron, the Duchesse du Maine, the Marquise de Lambert, Mme. du Deffand, Mme. d'Epinay, Mme. de Caylus, Mme. de Vintimille, Mme. Récamier, Mme. de Staël, and Mme. Girardin? Do we not know the courts of Louis XIV., Louis XV., Louis XVI., and Napoleon I. by the letters and memoirs of this splendid legion of women belonging to "la société polie" who have taught us the art of causer, that art of which we French have the monopoly?
This woman worship, from which chivalry sprang, is the source of another trait characteristic of the French nation, a trait which we have a right to be proud of. I speak of our respect for the weak. I engage that the lowest quarter of any French town would be roused into revolution at the sound of a man having ill-treated a woman or child. It is a sentiment innate in the Celt, and which would be found in the Englishman, if the Germanic element had not gained the ascendancy in England.[3]
Is there any prettier sight than that of our public gardens filled with well-dressed, bright-faced young mothers, whose husbands come, when business is over, to listen to the band at their side, and to take them to their homes, from which care is banished as far as possible, and where they are made sharers in each joy of their husbands?
Can we imagine a pleasure party of any kind without the presence of women? And when I say we, I mean all classes of society. When our workman sets out, on Sunday mornings, for the Jardin de la Muette or the Bois de Meudon, with provisions for the day, he takes his wife and children with him; and even his old mother, if he have one, must go too, or the party is not complete.
I confess that those world-famed English dinners which are not brightened by the presence of ladies have but little charm for me.