Truth compels us to add, however, that, apart from this moral recipe, another circumstance contributed to give the women greater importance in conjugal life. In France, as in every country where men are the ruling spirits, they were not fond of giving the girls a dowry, or at all events they gave them the smallest possible allowance. When the girls married, they received a sum representing in a way what would some years before have been called their “night-cap,” but what was then styled a “chaplet of roses,” and they renounced all claim on the inheritance. Accordingly a rich man did not think it at all extraordinary to wed a girl without a fortune, since that was the usual thing. Louis de la Trémoille married Gabrielle de Bourbon on those terms. Further, there was not the same difference between large, middling and small fortunes as there is to-day. With an income of three or four thousand livres, equal to £3000 or £4000 to-day, a man was thought a nabob. The husband, then, brought the money, and in addition he guaranteed a contingent jointure on his own property, so that it was really a home of his providing that the woman entered. A man in those days knew nothing of that pride now universally felt in wedding a millionaire’s daughter from Cincinnati, or even from Paris. To marry money struck people as shameful, almost infamous. A husband supported on his wife’s income was the object of heartfelt commiseration, and an establishment so organised seemed unworthy of the name. No sarcasm was keen enough for the classical “son-in-law of Monsieur Poirier,”[106] the dapper lordling, all genealogy and sport, whose sole accomplishment is a knack of plunging deep into debt, from which his worthy father-in-law (who made his money in treacle) toils behind the scenes to extricate him.