The most troublesome question to be settled in regard to feminism is that of the authority of the husband. Legally, the husband was head of the household, an idea which found ready acceptance among the lower ranks of society, and which the people applied with its habitual logic. It won warm approval from Rabelais. Nothing struck men as more grotesque than a husband suspected of having allowed his wife to get the upper hand. An artisan of Bourges, at whom some unpleasant neighbours hummed a refrain about a woman who thrashed her husband, on that ground alone brought against them an action for slander. In all sincerity, the husband considered himself an absolute owner, the lord and master, the head and soul of his wife, that “feminine and feeble creature” whom he condescended to take to his hearth, and who owed him, in the name of God and the law, “perfect love and obedience.” As to the wife, she was, so to speak, stepping into a railway train driven without her assistance. She had paid her fare, and wedlock stretched itself rigidly in front of her like the driver’s footboard, a place for manliness and nerve, but unromantic in the extreme. What matters to her the scenery along the line? The rippling sea may chant its amorous strains, the spring sun may dot the wilds with flowers, the tempest may sweep through the gorges, but the track stretches on and on in its direct unswerving course, with never a thrill, never a smile, unfaltering, unreflecting, mathematically. What was the wife but the principal servant, or the eldest of the children? She only addressed her master with the most profound respect. “Sir,” she would say to him, or “My good friend.” She was his “wife and subject”; if she wrote to him she signed, “your humble obedient handmaid and friend.” But her husband spoke to her stick in hand. The stick! that was the only argument the women understood. Bon cheval, mauvais cheval, veut l’esperon, Bonne femme, mauvaise femme, veut le baston.[98] Preachers spoke of the thrashings with a smile. Needless to say, the police did not interfere. Margaret of France did indeed think it a little vexatious that a lady honoured with the king’s attentions like the beautiful Madame de Chateaubriand should still receive correction of this sort under her husband’s roof-tree. But this was not all: the authority of the husband was often coupled with the tyranny of the mother-in-law. The husband’s mother, especially if she was a widow, rendered life horribly galling and difficult.