THE FRENCH "MOTHER OF THE PERIOD."

Southland Times, Issue 1169, 2 June 1869, Page 3

THE FRENCH "MOTHER OF THE PERIOD."

An occasional correspondent of the ' Daily News ' writes :— France had " mothers " once, but it would be hard to say what has become of them now, for the present mothers of this country are, without exception, hens who have hatched ducks' eggs, and the cackling they set up { when the duckling takes to its native . element is truly quite piteous. Compare with the women of historic France, whether under the Fronde and Ligue, or under the Great Revolution — compare, I repeat, the trembling, narrow-minded, priest-ridden females of this day, and you need seek no further for the raison d'etre of the petit creve. He is what he is because of the silly frightened woman who bore him, and who throughout her life has been persuaded that frivolity is a guarantee against ambition. When France had " mothers " she had women also, who took intense intesest in all great things— and ia politics above all. Now, a French woman is assured by her confessor that it is unwomanly to be political ; so she deliberately shuts up her intellect (which does naturally set that way), and strives hard to prevent her son from ever aspiring to what is called " power." She | herself has been brought up by governesses at home, or in a convent, and whichever way it has been, she has only heard one thing unanimously praised, and that one thing is money. Next to money, she has been taught to esteem highly the virtue of obedience. Combine the two, and the result is the money-match as the basis ot a whole social system. Little girls in convents, or at play in the gardens of the Tuileries, are busy with what each of their school-fellows will obtain as a dot on their marriage day, and how much that will enable them to lay out on their dress. At 16 or 17 they are to be " established," and an individual is presented to them whom papa and mamma have decided to | accept. But as the present fiction is that girls do actually choose for themselves (mothers swear this is so), the young lady is advised to delight in her parents' choice, and the young man is ordered, not only to marry, but to fall in love. A comedy of some kind is got up in which no one believes, but in which a whole family, even uuto the remotest aunts and cousins, affect to believe, and mademoiselle's fortune is added to monsieur's, and people are assuied that this is a marriage of " inclination." Yet still, and in spite of all this, there is a faint shadow of a shade of progress. The children now at school will not be exactly what their parents were (or are). In the first place, they are better fed. I would not be taken for a muscular Christian only ; but muscles have a deal to do with mind, and to bring up a child as French children are now brought up is inevitably to create a being with°other habits ,aud ideas than those of the present geueration. Every family now haa an English nurse ; and every child speaks English as soon as it does French. They are bathed ia cold water, go about with bare legs and arms, eat meat plainly roasted or boiled (I saw and ate of a boiled leg of mutton the other day in a French chateau !) ; and they romp ! Little boys learn to row, and little girls learn to ride ; and with all this the children who are now ten or twelve will astonish their papas and mammas when they come to be twenty. As I have already remarked, these changes have their origin in various circumstances — perhaps chiefly in the inevitably cosmopolitan tendencies of the Government. France owes but little to Louis Napoleon, politically, but to the circumstances in which he and his wife have been thrown she owes more than she yet knows ; freedom he has not given her, but he has given her beef, and cold baths, and bare legs for her babies, and both Franceand the Emperor will be astonished at what that will occasion one day ; for as a witty friend of mine here, parodying Buffon, says, Le hceuf c'est Vhomme !