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 this, but I know that in some French villages the bride is still
married in a mourning-gown. I should think she would be.
THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR GRANDMOTHERS
Every young woman of the present generation, so soon as she ventures to
have a headache or a set of nerves, is immediately confronted by indignant
critics with her grandmother. If the grandmother is living, the fact of her
existence is appealed to: if there is only a departed grandmother to
remember, the maiden is confronted with a ghost. That ghost is endowed with
as many excellences as those with which Miss Betsey Trotwood endowed the
niece that never had been born; and just as David Copperfield was
reproached with the virtues of his unborn sister who "would never have run
away," so that granddaughter with the headache is reproached with the
ghostly perfections of her grandmother, who never had a headache--or, if
she had, it is luckily forgotten.
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