Paternal authority has declined more rapidly in some countries than in others. The process has been especially slow in France. In the literature of the eleventh century, says M. Bernard, the paternal character is “everywhere honoured, and filial piety everywhere praised and rewarded. In the romances of chivalry fathers are never ridiculous; nor sons insolent and mocking.... Above the majesty of the feudal baron, that of the paternal power was held still more sacred and inviolable. However powerful the son might be, he would not have dared to outrage his father, whose authority was in his eyes always confounded with the sovereignty of command.”[1474] This respect exercised a tyrannical dominion for centuries. Du Vair remarks, “Nous devons tenir nos pères comme des dieux en terre.”[1475] Bodin wrote, in the later part of the sixteenth century, that, though the monarch commands his subjects, the master his disciples, the captain his soldiers, there is none to whom nature has given any command except the father, “who is the true image of the great sovereign God, universal father of all things.”[1476] In the Duke of Sully’s ‘Memoirs’ we read that, in his days in France, children were not permitted to sit in the presence of their parents without being commanded to do so.[1477] According to the edicts of Henry III. (1566), Louis XIII. (1639), and Louis XIV. (1697), sons could not marry before the age of thirty, nor daughters before that of twenty-five, without the consent of the father and mother, on pain of being disinherited.[1478] Speaking of the women among the nobility and upper classes in France during the eighteenth century, Messrs. de Goncourt remark, “Généralement le mariage de la jeune fille se faisait presque immédiatement au sortir du couvent, avec un mari accepté et agréé par la famille. Car le mariage était avant tout une affaire de famille, un arrangement au gré des parents, qui décidaient des considérations de position et d’argent, des convenances de rang et de fortune. Le choix était fait d’avance pour la jeune personne, qui n’était pas consultée.”[1479]