eoisie of France: the marriage of
convenience from which love was excluded, and the marriage for love,
which, nine times out of ten, was a _mesalliance_. And, to do justice to
the old system, let me say that, as a rule, the marriages of convenience
turned out to be much happier than _mesalliances_, which generally
consisted in marrying mistresses--that is to say, according to Balzac,
in changing tolerably good wine into very sour vinegar. However, in
these marriages of convenience, arranged by families, the social
position of the bridegroom and the dot of the bride were the first
considerations, and these couples, after being married, often discovered
they were made one for the other, and more than one husband won his wife
by courting, and really fell in love with her. In cases of
_mesalliance_, after the hours of passion had gone, the husband
discovered that all his prospects in life were destroyed through being
married to a woman he would never be able to make acceptable to the
people of the set he belonged to, and often despair followed disgust,
for woe to married people if either of them has the slightest cause for
being ashamed of the other!

But things are being changed, and a splendid sign of the times it is,
too. Young Frenchmen now seek wives among the families of their own
stations in life, court them, and make up their minds to marry them,
and, what is best of all, parents begin to realize that, after all, it
is their sons, and not themselves, who marry, and that it is they who
should make their choices.

I believe that this new state of things, which I hope, for my country,
will last, and even yet improve, is greatly due to the influence of the
Anglo-Saxons, English and Americans, whose freedom in matrimonial
matters is getting more and more familiar to the French through reading
and travelling.

Like the Anglo-Saxons, they begin to see the practical side of
matrimony. The young Frenchman says to himself: 'I do not send my father
to my tailor to choose the clothes I am to wear, and I do not see why I
should allow him to go and choose for me the girl I am to marry.'

There are other reasons which may also be due to the ever-increasing
influence of Anglo-Saxon manners and customs on France. The French girl
is every day getting freer. She is no longer cloistered, as it were, at
home and at school. She now frequents the society of young men, gets
better acquainted with them, and on more intimate terms than b