The only opportunity a young man has of seeing a girl is at a distance, at church or in a religious procession. Here he may see her face; her character he can only ascertain through gossip, a lady friend, or the parish priest. It is much more respectable, however, to show no such curiosity, for its absence implies the absence of such a ridiculous thing as Love. “_There is nothing which good society in France disapproves of so much as the passion of Love_, or anything resembling it.” “When Cœlebs asks for the hand of a girl he has seen for a minute, he may just possibly be in love with her, which is a degrading supposition; but if he has never seen her, you cannot even suspect him of a sentiment so unbecoming.” There is but one way for the young man to gain admission to a house where there is a marriageable young lady: “He must first, through a third party, ask to marry the young lady, and, if her _parents_ consent, he will then be admitted to see her and speak to her, but not otherwise. _The respectable order of affairs is that the offer and acceptance should precede and not follow courtship._” Would it be possible to conceive a more diabolically ingenious social machinery for massacring Romantic Love _en gros_? “Marriages in France are generally arranged by the exercise of reason and prudence, rather than by either passion or affection.” Mr. Hamerton gives an amusing account of how he was asked to be matrimonial ambassador by a young man who had never seen the girl he wanted to marry. Mr. Hamerton obliged the young man, but was told by the mother that if the young man would wait two years he might have a fair chance, provided a _richer_ or _nobler_ suitor did not turn up in the meantime. Money and Rank _versus_ Love. French mammas have at least one virtue. They are not hypocrites. The Countess von Bothmer, who lived in France a quarter of a century, says in her _French Home Life_: “Where we so ordinarily listen to what we understand by love—to the temptations of the young heart in all their forms (however transitory), to our individual impressions and our own opinions—the French consult fitness of relative situation, reciprocities of fortune and position, and harmonies of family intercourse.” To annihilate the last resource of Love—elopement—the _Code Napoléon_ forbids all marriages without either the consent of the father and mother, or proof that they are both dead. “It is very troublesome to get married in France; the operation is surrounded by difficulties and formalities which would make an Englishman stamp with rage.” Social life, of course, suffers as much from this idiotic system as Romantic Love. French hospitality “does not extend beyond the family circle,” we are informed by M. Max O’Rell, who also gives this amusing instance of the imbecility or mental slavery (he does not use these words) produced by the French system of education and chaperonage:—