The dictionaries say that _mésalliance_ signifies marriage with an inferior, but they fail to explain the kind of inferiority indicated. Would moral or intellectual inferiority in one of the parties constitute a _mésalliance_ for the other? It would most assuredly in reality, and bring its own daily and hourly punishment; but opinion overlooks these trifles, which only concern the parties directly interested. Does a _mésalliance_ result from a difference of rank? English opinion is very elastic about rank; we see marriages between titled and untitled people every day. Does it result from inequality of wealth? That inequality is far more frequent between married people in England, an aristocratic country, than under the French Republic. The rule against _mésalliances_ in England amounts to no more than this, that the parties to the marriage ought to belong to the same _monde_, that is, they ought to have been seen in the same houses. In France it is a _mésalliance_ for a noble to marry a commoner, and this certainly marks a more trenchant line than any that exists in England, where a commoner may belong to the aristocracy, which he cannot do in France, unless he succeeds in making himself a false noble. Marriages with rich commoners are not infrequent in France, but they are always confessedly _mésalliances_. On the whole, I should say that so far as marriage is concerned, ideas of class are decidedly more rigorous in France than in England. The woman’s name and condition survive more after the marriage in France. Great numbers of French people put their wife’s surname after their own, and even if this is not done formally, the linen and silver may be marked with the two initials. A Frenchman will sometimes use his mother’s surname instead of his father’s, if it seems to him more euphonious. In formal announcements of deaths and marriages the wife’s surname is frequently preserved. The habit of saying Madame de B. _née_ de C. is a French habit, and she may be called in legal documents Jeanne de C., wife of Gaston de B., as if her name survived after marriage, which it really does in the French conception of marriage. [Sidenote: Pecuniary Value of the French _de_.] [Sidenote: Loss of the _Particule_.] [Sidenote: The New and False Noble.]