“I remember I was one day sitting in the Champs Elysées with two English ladies. Beside us was a young French girl with her father and mother. The person on the right of papa rose and went away, and we heard the young innocent say to her mother: ‘Mamma, may I go and sit by papa?’ It was a baby of about eighteen or twenty. Those English ladies laugh over the affair to this day.” Boys suffer as well as girls. As the author of an article on “Parisian Psychology” remarks: “There are no mothers in France; it is a nation of ‘mammas,’ who, in the most unlimited sense of the word, spoil their boys, weaken them in body and soul, dwarf their thought, dry their hearts, and lower them to below even their own level, hoping thereby to rule over them through life, as they too often do. Frenchwomen having been at best but half-wives, regard their children as a sort of compensation for what they have themselves not had; and after the mischievous fashion of weak ‘mammas’ prolong babyhood till far into mature life.” The French, in fact, are a nation of babies. Their puerile conceit, which prevents them from learning to read any language but their own, and thus finding out what other nations think of them, is responsible in part for the mediæval barbarism of their matrimonial arrangements. The Parisian is the most provincial animal in the world. In any other metropolis—be it London, New York, Vienna, or Berlin—people understand and relish whatever is good in literature, art, and life, be it English, American, French, German, or Italian. But the Parisian understands only what is narrowly and exclusively French. And this is the dictionary definition of Provincialism. The consequences of this mediævalism and provincialism in modern France are thus eloquently summed up by a writer in the _Westminster Review_ (1877):— “Such education as girls receive is not only not a preparation for the wedded state, it is a positive disqualification for it. They are not taught to read, they are not taught to reason; they are _launched into life without a single intellectual interest_. The whole effort of their early training goes to fill their mind with puerilities and superstitions. As regards God, they are instructed to believe in relics and old bones; as regards man, they are instructed to believe in dress, in mannerisms, and coquetry. Their love of appreciation, after being enormously developed, is bottled up and tied down until a husband is found to draw the cork. What else, then, can we look for but an explosion of frivolity? Can we expect that such a provision of coquettishness will be reserved for the husband’s exclusive use? He will be tired of it in three months—unless it is tired of him before; and then the pent-up waters will forsake their narrow bed and overflow the country far and wide.”