BUSINESS HABITS OF FRENCH WOMEN.

Westport Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1227, 10 November 1874, Page 3

BUSINESS HABITS OF FRENCH WOMEN.

In the trading class, the business world of the French, the women exercise a directing and demanding despotism over men not to be met with in any other country in the world. They manage all branches of the business, buy, sell, fix prices, receive customers, give orders to the workmen, have all bills addressed to them, invest gains in their favorite securities, say they will have only two children, tell the husband what he is to do from morning till night. Is it not Mr Tennyson who has written " Woman is lesser than man?" Not in Frauce among the industrious and agricultural classes. The French bourgeoise woman is a hardworking, sharp, calculating, domineering animal, who keeps the husband in a state of awe, does not allow him to have any opinion of his own, and treats him with less consideration than domestic servants get from their masters and mistresses. The French husband of the middle and lower classes is at home a timid, retiring, subdued being, whose very voice has lost all accent and decision. We had a striking example of this the other day. We were commissioned by an English lady to purchase for her some imitation jewellery at a shop in the Boulevards. The wife, as usual, presided at the counter. Whilst looking at the sham gems (which appeared all real excepting the diamonds) she exclaimed, " Pardon Monsieur," and called her husband from the back, dark regions of the shop, and said, " Harry, you will take the children out into the gardens of the Tuileries for an hour; I ' expect you back at four o'clock to help me to make out that invoice for the Brazilian order." Henry obeyed, and carried the younger child in his arms. A French woman of this class will even order her husband's clothes, and give him as much money as he ought to spend in the cafe , they are all strongminded, and entertain a profound contempt for the fern/me dumonde. There is another lemale monde now in Paris inspired with all the worst passions of the Great Devolution. They would guillotine the rich and finish the burning work of the Commune. They are the women who have lost husbands and friends by the entrance of the Versailles troops into Paris and the transportation of thousands who escaped death. They are now in a state of great poverty, and are ready for any desperate work.