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THE WOMEN AND THE SALONS OF FRANCE,
UNDER THE EMPIRE, THE RESTORATION, AND THE MONARCHY OF JULY,
Cardinal Mazarin said to Don Louis de Haro, at the time of the peace of the Pyrenees: "How lucky you are in Spain: there, women are satisfied with being coquettish or devout; they obey their lover or their confessor, and interfere with nothing else. But here, they wish to govern the State. We have three such: the Duchess of Chevreuse, the Princess Palatine, and the Duchess of Longueville, women who would overthrow empires by their intrigues."
The Chancellor Maupeon used to say that women could not understand politics more than geese. A Duke of Wurtemberg held the intelligence of the fair sex in equally low estimation. His wife having ventured an observation upon the war which he had to sustain against Swabia, "Madame," he said, "we took you to give us a successor, and not to give us advice."
Jean V. of Brittany averred that a woman knew all that was wanted of her "quand elle savoit mettre différence entre la chemise et le pourpoinct de son mary." Molière has dramatised this historical saying, related by Montaigne, in his "Femmes Savantes:"
Nos pères, sur ce point, étaient gens bien sensés,
Qui disaient qu'une femme en sait toujours assez
Quand la capacité de son esprit se hausse
A connaître un pourpoint d'avec un haut-de-chausse.
In a letter of the 6th of November, 1806, the Emperor Napoleon I. wrote to Josephine: "You appear to be annoyed at the bad things I say of women. It is true I hate intriguing women above all things. I am accustomed to women who are good, mild, and conciliating; those are the women I like."
Always ready to enter the lists with the conqueror of Italy, Madame de Staël asked him one day, in a large circle of society, who in his estimation was the first woman in the world, dead or alive?
"Celle qui a fait le plus d'enfants," answered Napoleon, smiling.
Notwithstanding these records of ungallant attacks made by authority upon the fair sex. Dr. Veron justly remarks, that in France women have always exercised a certain empire upon society as it existed in their time; they have known how to change their parts, their attitudes, and their seductions under different régimes; and, at many epochs of French history, they have even pretended to govern the State.[1]
The empire of women was of brief duration at the breaking out of the revolution of 1789: the salons, at that epoch so numerous, so brilliant, and a few nights previously so powerful, were speedily dispersed by brutal and threatening influences—those of the clubs and the street; influences which put to the rout all assemblages which required a certain quietude for their effective development.
Madame de Staël, at that time in her première jeunesse, made an attempt, during the administration of M. de Narbonne and of the Legislative Assembly, to exercise a certain influence upon that assembly in her salon, and to rally and to direct its principal members, as at a
- ↑ Mémoires d'un Bourgeois de Paris. Par Le Docteur Véron. Tome Sixième.
