Page:French life in town and country (1917).djvu/238

 wisely dominate at home, have seemingly little or no objection to play the animal on paper. Of course there is a cultured and distinguished class who detest the modern fiction and plays of their country, who protest against them at home and in the Press, who will tell you they read only foreign novels, to avoid being dragged through the mire of their own.

This brings me to the consideration of woman's rôle in France. The foreigner who only judges that rôle from the novels he reads, mostly pornographic, and from the drama, increasingly gross and immoral, will be all at sea as regards the part woman plays in French life. He will conceive her first playing the hypocrite up to the time of marriage, and then living without restraint ever afterwards. He will wonder what time is left her for domestic duties, and judge her social duties merely as convenient stages along the downward path. If he enjoys that sort of thing, she will amuse and interest him, but he will underestimate her position in reality. For no one plays a more important rôle in the ranks of humanity than the Frenchwoman. She it is who rules the home, and in what an admirable way she rules it can never be sufficiently extolled. She it is who trains, fashions, guides man in every step of his career, from his boyhood into his first love-affair, and makes of him the courteous and indulgent creature he proves in matrimony. As