ed upon seeing, receiving,
and becoming intimately acquainted with the suitor, a custom quite
different from that practised among the nobility. Instead of giving
her rights as it did the girl of the nobility, marriage imposed duties
upon the girl of the middle class; it closed the world instead of
opening it to her; it ended her brilliant, gay, and easy life, instead
of beginning it, as was the case in the higher classes. This she
realized, therefore hesitated long before taking the final step which
was to bind her until death.

With her, becoming a wife meant infinitely more than it did to the
girl of the nobility; her husband had the management of her money, and
his vices were visited upon her and her children--in short, he became
her master in all things. These disadvantages she was taught to
consider deeply before entering the marriage state.

This state of affairs developed distinctive physiognomies in the
different classes of the middle-class society: thus, "the wives of the
financiers are dignified, stern, severe; those of the merchants are
seductive, active, gossiping, and alert; those of the artists are
free, easy, and independent, with a strong taste for pleasure and
gayety--and they give the tone." As we approach the end of the
century, the _bourgeoisie_ begins to assume the airs, habits,
extravagances, and even the immoralities, of the higher classes.

Below the _bourgeoise_ was the workingwoman, whose ideas were limited
to those of a savage and who was a woman only in sex. Her ideas of
morality, decency, conjugal happiness, children, education, were
limited by quarrels, profanity, blows, fights. At that time brandy was
the sole consolation for those women; it supplied their moral force
and their moral resistance, making them forget cold, hunger, fatigue,
evil, and giving them courage and patience; it was the fire that
sustained, comforted, and incited them.

These women were not much above the level of animals, but from them,
we find, often sprang the entertainers of the time, the queens of
beauty and gallantry--Laguerre, D'Hervieux, Sophie Arnould. Having
lost their virtue with maturity, these women had no sense of morality;
in them, nothing preserved the sense of honor--their religion
consisted of a few superstitious practices. The constituents of duty
and the virtue of women they could only vaguely guess; marriage itself
was presented to them under the most repugnant image of constant
contention.