d chateau a provincial wife ignorant
enough to say "my dear" to her husband before company.[2226]--Already
separated at the fireside, the two lives diverge beyond it at an ever
increasing radius. The husband has a government of his own: his private
command, his private regiment, his post at court, which keeps him absent
from home; only in his declining years does his wife consent to follow
him into garrison or into the provinces.[2227] And rather is this the
case because she is herself occupied, and as seriously as himself; often
with a position near a princess, and always with an important circle
of company which she must maintain. At this epoch woman is as active
as man,[2228] following the same career, and with the same resources,
consisting of the flexible voice, the winning grace, the insinuating
manner, the tact, the quick perception of the right moment, and the art
of pleasing, demanding, and obtaining; there is not a lady at court who
does not bestow regiments and benefices. Through this right the wife has
her personal retinue of solicitors and proteges, also, like her husband,
her friends, her enemies, her own ambitions, disappointments, and
rancorous feeling; nothing could be more effectual in the disruption
of a household than this similarity of occupation and this division
of interests.--The tie thus loosened ends by being sundered under the
ascendancy of opinion. "It looks well not to live together," to grant
each other every species of tolerance, and to devote oneself to society.
Society, indeed, then fashions opinion, and through opinion it creates
the morals which it requires.

Toward the middle of the century the husband and wife lodged under the
same roof, but that was all. "They never saw each other, one never met
them in the same carriage; they are never met in the same house;
nor, with very good reason, are they ever together in public." Strong
emotions would have seemed odd and even "ridiculous;" in any event
unbecoming; it would have been as unacceptable as an earnest remark
"aside" in the general current of light conversation. Each has a duty to
all, and for a couple to entertain each other is isolation; in company
there is no right to the tete-a-tete.[2229] It was hardly allowed for
a few days to lovers.[2230] And even then it was regarded unfavorably;
they were found too much occupied with each other. Their preoccupation
spread around them an atmosphere of "constraint and ennui; one had to
be u