The one evil is the trying strain of expense to which an extremely high standard of living subjects all except the rich. It keeps all current expenses high, and therefore weighs pitilessly on those who must be refined and have not large independent means. A prudent young Englishman may well hesitate before he enters upon marriage with the prospect of a large house full of children and servants in which no shabbiness, bareness, or imperfection is to be tolerated. So far as pecuniary prudence is concerned, he would probably do better to fill a stable with fine horses. The Archbishop of Canterbury, whilst lamenting the early marriages of the improvident classes, has declared that the young men in the comfortable classes “are giving up the idea of marriage.” This is the visible result. There is another consequence not so visible to the world in the harassed lives of unnumbered heads of families, the men whose days and nights are a combination of bodily comfort with mental toil and anxiety, the men to whom physical hardship would come, if they could only have it, as a counter-irritant and relief. [Sidenote: Comfort little known in France.] [Sidenote: French Habitations.] There has been little about the French in this chapter, and what there is to say may be expressed in few words. They have not naturally a genius for comfort like the English. Their natural way of living is hard in poverty and luxurious in riches, austerity and luxury equally belonging to the French nature. Of comfort they know what they have imperfectly learned from their English neighbours. At Versailles, in the days of Louis XIV., there was dazzling splendour, but comfort was utterly unknown. Modern French country houses (I mean those built for rich people in the second half of the nineteenth century) are planned as intelligently as the English, but the older châteaux were incredibly rough and wanting in the most elementary arrangements. Even yet, in the old provincial towns, French people put up with lodgings so awkwardly planned that an Englishman would not rent them. New town houses are better contrived, but still deficient in space. [Sidenote: Luxury less Indispensable than Comfort.] The question of expenditure is favourable to the French in this way, that they do without luxury more easily than the English do without comfort. The Frenchman in adversity falls back on the austere side of his nature; being both Sybarite and Spartan, he has the Spartan half of himself always ready for hard times. An impoverished French gentleman lodges in bare small rooms and lives principally on soup.[64] It is ten times harder for an Englishman to give up his spacious house with carpets on the floors. [Sidenote: Comfort and Luxury equally Costly.]