FRENCH WOMEN AS TALKERS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 5384, 29 June 1878, Page 3

FRENCH WOMEN AS TALKERS.

(From Blackwood'e Magazine.)

Of three exterior forms of action—talk, manner, and dress—which are at the disposal of all women, it is from talk that the French extract their real results. Their employment of manner and of dress is conducted with a scientific skill unknown in any other land; but groat as is their proficiency in the handling of those two sources of influence, it is by talk alone that they bring about the highest and most subjugating of their effects. Even the accident of beauty helps them but little, it is so frequent amongst them; they are, by their nature, so disinclined to trust to passive elements of attraction; they are, on the contrary, so accustomed to energetically employ the most active measures of attack; they are all so thickly surrounded by examples of constant and vigorous use of personal exertion in order to please, to influence, and to win—that by the joint force of habit and example they learn to regard mere ordinary beauty, if they happen to possess any of it, as a weapon which is usually insufficient to carry them to a victorious position in their world. Scarcely any of the French women who are endowed with it attach excessive pride to it. They perceive that it disposes other people to look at them admiringly, and to talk somewhat about them, but with their prodigious com-mon-sense, and with their singular national capacity for rightly estimating the relative value of tilings, they recognise that, by itself, it rarely leads them to any solid influence. The men and women round them want more than prettiness—they desire to talk, to listen, to be amused and interested. So, as looking or being looked at is not enough for any of them, they end by laying down the law that beauty alone gives no sufficient masteries in life to its holder. And, furthermore, even if it did bestow complete authority and undisputed control, there are not many women in France who would content themselves with unwon homage—who would content to leave their faces to inertly conquer for them—who would sit down silently in their beauty and abandon the inspiriting strife which leads to well-gained consciously merited command. The women of France are an essentially living race—a race of combatants, who scorn unfonght for victories and torpid triumphs. Their joy in life is, not only to fight, but to fight with arms which they have forged themselves for their own hands, and so to accomplish a double success as belligerents and as manufacturers. Under such conditions, and with such natures, it is comprehensible enough that Frenchwomen should regard talk as their sword of war, manner and dress as supplementary weapons of attack, and beauty as an anaggressive ally, which adds, it is true, to tho effect of a review of troops, but which is of little reliable service in campaigning.