That such marriages _must_ exist will be evident to any one who reflects that in France there are dowerless girls who get married nevertheless. Neither does a dowerless girl invariably accept the first young gentleman who proposes himself. I myself have known several poor French girls who refused good offers; a very striking instance came within my knowledge during the composition of this volume.[82] A French mother said to me, “I have never regretted not to have been able to give dowries to my daughters. They had several offers which were addressed to themselves and not to their purses, and they married most happily.” The expression “marry for money” would apply, no doubt, to some cases (as in England, for there are fortune-hunters everywhere), but it does not apply to the great majority of French marriages. The accurate way of stating the case is this. _A Frenchman generally expects his wife to bear part of the household expenses._ As it does not often happen that the wife can follow a profession or a trade, such an expectation amounts to the expectation of a dowry. In most cases the amount of this dowry is so moderate that an Englishman would say the girl had nothing--he would not take such a sum into consideration, one way or the other, when he married. For me (who know a great deal more about the inside of French life than can conveniently be printed), I have come to the conclusion that with the present rate of expenses a dowry must be much larger than French dowries usually are to give the young husband the satisfaction of having made a good financial speculation by his marriage. A few hundreds of pounds or a _very_ few thousands are the ordinary dowries in the middle classes, and neither the hundreds nor the thousands are any compensation for the pitiless pecuniary exigencies of married life. No young gentleman in his senses imagines that he can improve his financial position by marrying a young lady of elegant tastes endowed with two hundred a year. Yet that income, at five per cent, represents a capital of a hundred thousand francs, which is an exceptionally large dowry for a French girl in the middle classes. A girl whose father can give four thousand pounds has probably been brought up in a family living in some style, and she will expect a considerable expenditure.[83] It might be a better speculation to take an industrious housewife of simple tastes, without a penny in the world. The small dowries and the very large ones may be useful to two different classes of men. The small dowries are often valuable to people in the struggling classes because they may enable the husband to advance his trade. A journeyman joiner marries a girl with five hundred pounds and becomes a master, a very small shopkeeper may take a larger shop. But what is the good of, say, a thousand pounds to a poor physician or professor? The money by itself might be acceptable, but a wife with it can only mean an increase of his poverty. Yet this is the