declared
themselves enchanted with each other.

"_Tres-bien_," said the reflective parents. "Now fall in love as
fast as ever you please."

Monsieur and mademoiselle not only "fell," but plunged.

Two weeks afterward, however, the papas fell out. Cafetier exacted more
than Commis could promise, and Commis declared Mademoiselle Clothilde
_pas grand' chose_: her eyebrows were too white, and her toes
turned in.

The marriage was declared "off," and the young people were ordered to
fall out of love the quickest possible.

"Too late!" they cried.

"You have seen each other but four times."

"Quite enough," declared the lovers.

"You shall not marry," shouted the parents.

"We _will_!" screamed their offspring.

Nevertheless they could not, for the French law gives almost absolute
power to parents. Mademoiselle would have no _dot_ unless her
father chose to give her one, and no French marriage is legal without
paternal consent or the almost disgraceful expedient of _sommations
respectueuses_. Mademoiselle threatened to enter a convent. Cafetier
assured her that no convent opens cordial doors to _dot_less girls.

Juliet was ready to defy all the Capulets when she had seen Romeo but
once; Corinne was ready to fling all her laurels at Oswald's feet at
their second interview; Rosamond Vincy planned her house-furnishing
during her second meeting with Lydgate; even Dorothea Brooke felt a
"trembling hope" the very next day after her first sight of Mr.
Casaubon. How, then, could one expect poor Clothilde to yield up her
undersized, thin-moustached, and very unheroic-looking Henri, having
seen him _four_ times?

There was one way out of her troubles,--that to which Alphonse Daudet's
and Andre Theuriet's people gravitate as needles to their pole. She
walked one dark midnight upon the jetty alone. Nobody saw the end; but
the next Sunday, three weeks to a day from the one when the two had
countermarched in matrimonial procession, Mademoiselle Clothilde was
laid in her grave.

The whole French social system revolves around the _dot_.

"How dare you speak to my father so!" I once heard a daughter reproach
her mother. "How dare you, who brought him no _dot_!"

"It is a pity Madame Marais has no more influence in her family," I
heard remarked in a social company. "It is a pity, for she is a good
woman, and her husband and sons are all going to the bad."

"Yes, it is a pity," answered another; "but, then, what else can s