The country squire bore his straitened circumstances with rather an ill grace. Rubbing shoulders with the peasants (and the humblest peasant was a lord in his own eyes) and with the village authorities; a determined foe to Jews, financiers, and monopolists; a democrat, persuaded that all men are equal, or nearly so; resigned moreover to figure as head of his village, since a head it was bound to have, but troubling himself very little about the other social magnates; he shut himself up in his estates like his father and grandfather before him, among the sons and grandsons of the people by whom those respectable personages had been surrounded. He was an excellent man, of bluff manners and healthy appetite, determined to keep his eldest son waiting for his inheritance as long as possible, and to disperse the rest of his family, sending the boys into the Church or the army, and marrying the girls to his neighbours. He had a grudge against Louis XII. for giving the landed interest nothing but fair words: Francis I., who multiplied court appointments and paid handsome salaries, appeared to him the right sort of king for agriculturists. That was the kind of man with whom and for whom the majority of the women of French society lived. At bottom, this husband is an idealist; he despises money, and plumes himself on the fact with a certain smug satisfaction; but in his home life he frequently acts as an absolute realist, a cold-blooded calculator. He will readily and with the utmost chivalrousness admit that women in general are superior beings, worthy of much liberty; but he insists on his particular woman remaining on a lower plane and occupying herself with practical matters. He relinquishes to her the honour of keeping the accounts, he even authorises her to negotiate a bargain, or to secure payment of a due, while he himself hunts, settles disputes among his peasants, potters about, or does nothing. Montaigne is eager to avow that he has no concern with business; in his view it is ridiculous and unjust “that the idleness of our wives should be fostered with our sweat and maintained by our toil.” He admits in the most liberal manner the right of women to work, and does so from pure goodness of heart, since women delight in managing, and a woman who works wants no pity! While Madame de Montaigne is keeping his accounts, planting, reaping, looking after the masons, her intellectual husband is good-naturedly gossiping about mankind at large, or tranquilly contemplating the backs of his books, or dawdling through Italy, on the principle that travel is the salt of wedlock, poking his nose into everything on the way, halting at the watering-places, visiting interesting young ladies; all the time reverencing his wife, oh, so deeply! He feels that when he returns and finds her among the haymakers, his love will take a new lease of life: “These interruptions fill me with a new kind of affection towards mine own people, and make my house so