France is
the country where that sweet Christian institution of mariages de
convenance (which so many folks of the family about which this story
treats are engaged in arranging) is most in vogue. There the newspapers
daily announce that M. de Foy has a bureau de confiance, where families
may arrange marriages for their sons and daughters in perfect comfort and
security. It is but a question of money on one side and the other.
Mademoiselle has so many francs of dot; Monsieur has such and such rentes
or lands in possession or reversion, an etude d'avoue, a shop with a
certain clientele bringing him such and such an income, which may be
doubled by the judicious addition of so much capital, and the pretty
little matrimonial arrangement is concluded (the agent touching his
percentage), or broken off, and nobody unhappy, and the world none the
wiser. The consequences of the system I do not pretend personally to
know; but if the light literature of a country is a reflex of its
manners, and French novels are a picture of French life, a pretty society
must that be into the midst of which the London reader may walk in twelve
hours from this time of perusal, and from which only twenty miles of sea
separate us.
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