Particularly in France, women needed genuine courage to assert their resolution to act and take part in social work, in the midst of a society essentially constituted to prevent them from giving effective expression to their ideas—a society that was strenuous, Philistine, utterly strange to philosophy and imaginative thinking, hidebound to traditions of very rudimentary common-sense and a proud simplicity, composed of families desirous of living in their own fashion under the direction of their head, with no grand notion of forming parts of one stupendous whole. The king was the head of the principal family; on this account, men showed the most artless veneration for his person, but so long as the army was duly organised and the frontiers properly defended at the least possible expense, they troubled themselves very little about their sovereign’s existence. So the despotic power of the husband was not merely domestic, but political: the man was lord of the lands and the village as he was of his wife, and he administered the whole without stirring up many ideas, in intimate communion with his oxen and his oaks. Again and again we find in portraits the rubicund faces of these honest-eyed country squires. There was nothing extraordinary or gigantic about such a man; he was a man of iron, that was all; and beside this substantial creature vegetated, half-stifled, that fine and precious flower his wife, sometimes a frail delicate thing with liquid eyes charmingly veiled, all compact of concentrated passion, placid tenderness, and impressionability.