The citizen Anet, son of Jean Louis Anet, and the citoyenne Maria Saint; she engaged to follow the said citizen everywhere and to love him always.—Anet. Maria Saint.
Witnessed by the under-mentioned citizen and citoyenne.—Fourier. Laroche.
Paris, April 22, 1871.
What a comfortable arrangement is this! Poor citoyenne Maria Saint, even when all human laws have suspended their action, still holds by her grammar, still must annex herself to le sexe noble. She still must follow citizen Anet as the feminine pronoun follows the masculine, or as a verb agrees with its nominative case in number and in person. But with what a lordly freedom from all obligation does citizen Anet, representative of this nobility of sex, accept the allegiance! The citizeness may “follow him,” certainly,—so long as she is not in the way,—and she must “love him always;” but he is not bound. Why should he be? It would be quite ungrammatical.
Yet, after all is said and done, there is a brutal honesty in this frank subordination of the woman according to the grammar. It has the same merit with the old Russian marriage-consecration: “Here, wolf, take thy lamb,” which at least put the thing clearly, and made no nonsense about it. I do not know that anywhere in France the wedding ritual is now so severely simple as that, but I know that in some rural villages of that country the bride is still married in a mourning-gown. I should think she would be.
VI.
PHYSIOLOGICAL CROAKING.
A very old man once came to King Agis of Sparta, to lament over the degeneracy of the times. The king replied, “What you say must be true; for I remember that when I was a boy, I heard my father say that when he was a boy, he heard my grandfather say the same thing.”
It is a sufficient answer to most of the croakers, that doubtless the same things have been said in every generation since the beginning of recorded time. Till within twenty years, for instance, it has been the accepted theory, that civilized society lost in vigor what it gained in refinement. This is now generally admitted to be a delusion growing out of the fact that civilization keeps alive many who would have died under barbarism. These feebler persons enter into the average, and keep down the apparent health of the community; but it is the triumph of civilization that they exist at all. I am inclined to think, that when we come to compare the nineteenth century with the seventeenth, as regards the health of women and the size of families, we shall find much the same result.
We look around us, and see many invalid or childless women. We say the Pilgrim mothers were not like these. We cheat ourselves by this perpetual worship of the pioneer grandmother. How the young bachelors, who write dashing articles in the newspapers, denounce their “nervous” sisters, for instance, and belabor them with cruel memories of their ancestors! “The great-grandmother of this helpless creature, very likely, was a pioneer in the woods; reared a family of twelve or thirteen children; spun, scrubbed, wove, and cooked; lived to eighty-five, with iron muscles, a broad chest and keen, clear eyes.” But no one can study the genealogies of our older New England families without noticing how many of the aunts and sisters and daughters of this imaginary Amazon died young. I think there may be the same difference between the households of to-day and the Puritan households that there is confessedly between the American families and the Irish: fewer children are born, but more survive.
And is it so sure that the families are diminishing, even as respects the number of children born? This is a simple question of arithmetic, for which the materials are being rapidly accumulated by the students of family history. Let each person take the lines of descent which are nearest to himself, to begin with, and compare the number of children born in successive generations. I have, for instance, two such tables at hand, representing two of the oldest New England families, which meet in the same family of children in this generation.