Читать книгу Common Sense About Women - Thomas Wentworth Higginson - Страница 10

The citizen Anet, son of Jean Louis Anet, and the citoyenne Maria Saint; she engaged to follow the said citizen everywhere and to love him always.—Anet. Maria Saint.

Witnessed by the under-mentioned citizen and citoyenne.—Fourier. Laroche.

Paris, April 22, 1871.

What a comfortable arrangement is this! Poor citoyenne Maria Saint, even when all human laws have suspended their action, still holds by her grammar, still must annex herself to le sexe noble. She still must follow citizen Anet as the feminine pronoun follows the masculine, or as a verb agrees with its nominative case in number and in person. But with what a lordly freedom from all obligation does citizen Anet, representative of this nobility of sex, accept the allegiance! The citizeness may “follow him,” certainly,—so long as she is not in the way,—and she must “love him always;” but he is not bound. Why should he be? It would be quite ungrammatical.

Yet, after all is said and done, there is a brutal honesty in this frank subordination of the woman according to the grammar. It has the same merit with the old Russian marriage-consecration: “Here, wolf, take thy lamb,” which at least put the thing clearly, and made no nonsense about it. I do not know that anywhere in France the wedding ritual is now so severely simple as that, but I know that in some rural villages of that country the bride is still married in a mourning-gown. I should think she would be.