Family affection, again, was not restricted to the brothers and sisters; it included all relations, and was supposed, whenever necessary, to show itself in practical help. Uncles and aunts were second fathers and mothers; god-parents were more than nominal connections; cousins were only another set of brothers and sisters. A maiden aunt, Mlle. Girard, called in the affectionate patois of Provence “our good tata,” helped to bring up Antoine’s children, and her brothers, far from wishing her to follow her first impulse, and, on account of her feeble health, take the veil in some neighboring convent, argued with her in favor of home life and duties. She died at the age of fifty-two, a holy death, as her life had been useful, humble, and charitable. Courtois himself considered marriage the natural state of man, and said that, for his part, he thought “there was no true happiness, and perhaps no salvation, outside of the married state.” But he looked upon it as so much a means to an end that he deprecated the interference of personal inclination against such practical considerations as health, virtue, becoming circumstances of fortune and station. He wisely said that one was only the steward of one’s own property, and was bound to hand it on unimpaired to one’s posterity; yet it is possible that he had too little confidence in the probably wise choice his children would make for themselves. It is true that the choice of mates by the parents provides in each generation a balance to the inability of the parents to choose for themselves in their own case—a sort of poetic retribution; and it is true also that men and women at the age of parents with marriageable children have just come to that maturity and perfection of judgment which enables them to be good guides to their sons and daughters while the latter are still in that chrysalis state when obedience is the wisest course. But such an education as he had given them should have made them more capable of discernment than others, and in his precepts there is perhaps as much of old tradition as of reaction against the subversive theories which were rending French society in pieces. How else interpret such a sweeping assertion as this: “A father is the only man a young girl need not fear”?—a withering comment, indeed, on the general state of society. On the important subject of marriage and its duties Mme. de Lamartine, the mother of the poet, has a beautiful passage in her journal, written at Milly, near Mâcon, at a small country house, whose orchards, meadows, and vineyards brought in the small income of six hundred dollars a year. On this she had a large family of sons to bring up and workmen to pay, yet the family life was as dignified and as calm as Abraham’s with his vast possessions. Her husband she calls a peerless man, “a man after God’s own heart,” and, as is often the case with the fathers of brilliant men, his character stands contrasted with that of the poet, as the oak by the side of the willow. The father of Macaulay was infinitely superior in his moral character to his amiable, genial, and gifted son—a man of iron, austerely upright, and a rock on which to depend, “through thick and thin,” but not what the world calls charming. Here is Mme. de Lamartine’s judgment, worthy to be graven in the heart of every bride as she leaves the altar:
“I was present to-day, 5th Feb., 1805, at a taking of the veil of a Sister of Mercy in the hospital at Mâcon. There was a sermon, in which the candidate was told that she had chosen a state of penance and mortification, and, as an emblem of this, a crown of thorns was put upon her head. I admired her self-sacrifice, but could not help remembering also that the state of the mother of a family, if she fulfils her duties, can match the cloistered state. Women do not think enough of it when they marry, but they really make a vow of poverty, since they entrust their fortune to their husbands, and can no longer use any of it except what he allows them to spend. We also take a vow of chastity and obedience to our husbands, since we are hereafter forbidden to seek to please or lure any other man. Over and above this we take a vow of charity towards our husbands, our children, our servants, including the duty of nursing them in sickness, of teaching them as far as we are able, and of giving them sound and Christian advice. I need not, therefore, envy the Sisters of Mercy; I have only faithfully to fulfil my duties, which are fully as arduous as theirs, and perhaps more so, since we are not surrounded by good examples, as they are, but rather by everything which would tend to distract us. These thoughts did my soul much good; I renewed my vows before God, and I trust to him to keep me always faithful to them.”[[179]]
Her life was serious and busy:
“I go to Mass every morning with my children at seven. Then we breakfast, and I attend to some housekeeping cares; then study, first the Bible, then grammar and French history—I sewing all the while.... My chief object is to make my children very pious and keep them constantly in full occupation.”
They had family prayer, too, and she says in her journal:
“It is a beautiful custom and most useful, if one would have one’s house, as Scripture recommends, a house of brethren. Nothing is so good for the mind of servants as this daily partaking with their masters in prayer and humiliation before God, who recognizes neither superiors nor inferiors. It is good for the masters to be thus reminded of Christian equality with those who are their inferiors in the world’s eyes, and the children are thus early taught to think of their true and invisible Father, whom they see their elders beseech with awe and confidence.”
The Courtois family were cousins of the Girards, one of whom, Philip de Girard, invented a flax-spinning machine in 1810, and many other mechanical improvements. In 1823 his father’s property was in danger of being sold at auction, and, having no capital but his genius, he made a contract with the Russian government, binding himself to become chief-engineer of the Polish mines for ten years. He thus saved his patrimony. A new town grew up around one of the factories established in Poland on his system, and took his name, Girardow; the present emperor has given the town a block of porphyry as a pedestal for the founder’s statue. He, too, was of the old French stock, a dutiful son and sincere Christian, schooled in tribulation in his own country, but, notwithstanding his many disappointments as an inventor, happy enough to have been buried in his own old home.
A better-known name is that of the D’Aguesseau family, a remarkable house, both for inherited piety and genius. The great chancellor of this name was a model son to a model father, and all his own children were worthy of him. Perhaps the La Ferronnays are equally fortunate; as far as their family life is revealed in A Sister’s Story, it seems cast in the same mould. Few, however, so prominent, and therefore so open to temptation, as the D’Aguesseaus have given such a sustained example of high virtue. The chancellor, whose family, always connected with the law, dated authentically from the end of the fifteenth century, was dangerously fortunate in his public career. At twenty-two he was advocate-general to the Parliament of Paris, and procurator-general at thirty-two, an orator famous all over France, a historian, a judge, a philosopher, and a writer. His name was synonymous with several important laws. He held the seals of the chancellorship for thirty-two years, and died in 1751, over eighty. His linguistic studies embraced Hebrew and Arabic—rare acquirements at that time—and he was also a good mathematician. His own saying, which he applied to his father, is no less true of himself: “The way of the righteous is at first but an imperceptible spot of light, which grows steadily by degrees till it becomes a perfect day.” Another of his maxims was that “public reform begins in home and self-reform.” His children’s education was his greatest solicitude, even among his public duties, and one gets an interesting glimpse of him in Mme. d’Aguesseau’s letters describing the business journeys of inspection on which he had to go, and which he made with his family in a big coach. The mother would open the day by prayer, and the sons then studied the classics and philosophy with their father, while even the hours of leisure were mostly filled up by reading; for the chancellor wisely taught his boys to choose subjects of interest out of school-hours, that they might not identify reading with compulsory tasks. School teaching he considered only as a basis for continued education by one’s self, and his ideal of his daughter’s education was the union of domestic deftness with scientific study. This daughter, in her turn, left to her sons advice such as truly proved her to be a mother in Israel. His wife he enthroned as a queen in his heart and his home, and would smile when others rallied him on his domestic obedience. He trusted to her for all home matters and expenses; and such women as she and those she represented were fit to be trusted.
The seventeenth century was essentially the age of great women in France, and the early part of the eighteenth still kept the tradition. Mme. de Chantal had a manly soul in a woman’s body, and yet proved herself as good a housekeeper as an administrator of her son’s estate while a minor. Prayer, work, and study went hand in hand in these women, and the D’Aguesseaus were only shining representatives of whole families and classes of noble wives and mothers. They remind one of some Scotch mothers and homes, in districts where old customs still abide; where servants are part of the family, yet never, in all their loving and rude familiarity, approach to a thought of disrespect or disobedience; where there is intense love but no demonstration; where honor and truth are loved better than life, and simplicity becomes in reality the most delicate and grave courtesy. D’Aguesseau loved farming as his chosen recreation, and vehemently denounced the rising prejudice of the young who were ashamed of their father’s simple homestead and refused to live such rustic lives. The Hebrew ideal—than which no finer has ever been invented—was his absolute standard of home-life, and how his father’s character answered to it we shall presently see. The publication of this manuscript biography and other domestic writings of the chancellor was due only to long-continued pressure, and his sons consented only with the hope of doing good to a perverse generation. In these days, when people are rather flattered than otherwise to see their names in print, even if it be only in a local sheet, many may wonder at this reticence which denoted the delicacy of this exceptional family. Whether the publication did good we can hardly judge; it must have helped to stop some on a downward career, or at least strengthened the weak resolves of some few struggling against the current.
The elder D’Aguesseau had singular natural advantages such as the majority lack, but much of this happy temperament was probably the result of generations of clean, temperate, and orderly living, such as his forefathers had been famous for. His son traces a portrait of him which seems to unite the primitive Christian with the ancient Roman: