Erasmus is astonished that women are still to be found willing to submit to all the trials of maternity; and indeed it would perhaps have been difficult to find such women, if, before venturing out upon so perilous a sea, they had not been able to insure themselves against the selfishness of men by a high conception of duty, stronger and, above all, more durable than the idea of a contract. They needed no persuasion to beware of self-delusion, to contemplate marriage under its most leaden hues; but yet they wished to retain for it its character as a refuge, rude but trustworthy. They derided the chimerical theories of Plato on free union; in short, all things considered, not one of them regretted having been married in the time-honoured way, since no other means had yet been discovered of assuring an honourable motherhood. Unions of policy and position, they very well knew, do not bring about a fusion of hearts; too often they become “suburbs of hell.” But what is to replace them? Marriages of passion and love? As a matter of fact, says a caustic critic, since as mere men we are no longer of any importance, or at any rate are all of equal value in the eyes of women, the question is becoming much simpler: a princess will be able to marry after her own heart, to wed a prince, or a peasant, as there is not a pin to choose between them. Where is the advantage? retorts a sage: love matches turn out as ill as the others. The only philosophy of marriage which women must cling to is that in this matter there is no philosophy. It is useless to attempt to sublimate it; what they have to do is to make the best they can of it, and satisfy themselves with a sort of virtuous affection, in accordance with the unfathomable designs of Providence. “Marriage,” says Margaret of France,[39] “should not admit of any objective either of pleasure or of self-interest: all the same, it is not a perfect state; let us be satisfied with wisely accepting it for what it is, a make-shift, but reputable.”[40] Thus the conclusion to which women tend to arrive in their cogitations on married life—and who have a better right to cogitate?—is that though they may submit to a husband, they no longer think themselves bound to adapt themselves to him, to identify themselves with him at every moment and in every caprice, or to worship this fellow-mortal with the same superstitious veneration as of yore. They see him as he is, a man, with certain qualities, human, in the nature of things, and certain defects, naturally far from divine: a physical creditor, whose claim they do not contest, but are well able to measure.