AT THE PORT OF AIGUES MORTES.
By E. M. Synge.
As for the tide in the affairs of women, it was at the neap. Lecky traces to Jewish sources a good deal of the contempt in which they were universally held. The tenth commandment, we may remember, enjoins that a man shall not covet his neighbour's house, nor his wife, nor his servant, nor his maid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his; a fairly plain and unvarnished way of expressing by inference the general view of marital relations.
"A woman," says this author, "was regarded as the origin of human ills"; and he quotes the saying of a Jewish writer that "the badness of men is better than the goodness of women." Our great-great-great-grandmothers, we may remember, used to be sold by their feudal lords to the highest bidder. That counts for something in a people's destiny. "Marriage," says M. Fauriel in his work on Provençal Poetry,[6] "was nothing more than a treaty of peace or alliance between two seigneurs, of whom the one took the daughter of the other as his wife."
Repudiation, the same author says, was a common device: in the case, for instance, of a married noble covetous of new territory, he would become conscience-stricken on reflecting that he was perhaps fourth cousin of his wife, and he hurried to the Church to release him from the burden of sin, the Church being complaisant towards a wealthy penitent.
"The exaggerated pretensions, refinements, subtleties of this [chivalrous] love," M. Fauriel continues, "took its rise in the interested motives of feudal marriage. The sufferings of women as wives partly explain the adoration of the chevaliers."
The women of those dark days were, in fact, born to humiliation and indignity as a mole is born to burrow in the earth. Both sexes suffered vassalage under a feudal superior, but the woman also endured domestic subservience. She was subject to the common lord and to her own particular lord into the bargain.