And yet society added one more tyranny. For a widow to marry again was scarcely tolerated.[121] She would have been just as severely chided for finding a second husband as she would have been for not finding a first.[122] She would be sooner forgiven for a frailty, a yielding to temptation, than for contracting a new tie. What woman was this who had not had too much of one husband, and was not amply satisfied? Among the people she was favoured with a sort of skimmington ride. Margaret of France defied the prejudice and married again: it was in sooth the deed of a philosophic woman. But in general, widows were still chained to their widowhood by various considerations; in the first place, the practical difficulty of finding another husband. Men were quite ready to court a widow, but very few would make the sacrifice involved in marrying her. A woman no longer young, a “shelled peascod,” who no longer had anything to give and had settled habits of her own, was the antipodes of the little maiden of twelve so much in request. Besides, the widow herself was enjoying a large and tranquil life, thanks to the jointure of which a second marriage would deprive her; sometimes the whole of her husband’s fortune had come to her on condition that she devoted herself to the children. She held in all matters the authority which had belonged to the dead man, and indeed it was not uncommon for the husband expressly to bequeath her this authority in his will.[123] The drawback to this life of business management is precisely that a woman loses in it something of the bloom of her grace and sweetness, she no longer needs to employ persuasiveness and love since she has force at her disposal, and the result is that she becomes a sort of man, and acquires some of the defects by which she has suffered at the hands of her husband. We can thus understand quite well that a woman who wishes to remain a woman will do her best, for her own security and charm’s sake, to live under the fostering wing of a precious memory, and will cherish with the utmost devotion her (so to speak) posthumous husband. There lies her real strength.