nious M. Genin has very recently collected the
most curious information on this point.

[62] Boguet, Lancre, and other authors, are agreed on this
question.

They were drawn thither by the banquet, the dancing, the lights, the
amusements; in nowise by carnal pleasure. The last thing they cared
for was to heighten their poverty, to bring one more wretch into the
world, to give another serf to their lord.

* * * * *

Cruel indeed was the social system of those days. Authority bade men
marry, but rendered marriage nearly impossible, at once by the
excessive misery of most, and the senseless cruelty of the canonical
prohibitions.

The result was quite opposed to the purity thus preached. Under a show
of Christianity existed the patriarchate of Asia alone.

Only the firstborn married. The younger brothers and sisters worked
under him and for him. In the lonely farms of the mountains of the
South, far from all neighbours and every woman, brothers and sisters
lived together, the latter serving and in all ways belonging to the
former; a way of life analogous to that in Genesis, to the marriages
of the Parsees, to the customs still obtaining in certain shepherd
tribes of the Himalayas.

The mother's fate was still more revolting. She could not marry her
son to a kinswoman, and thus secure to herself a kindly-affected
daughter-in-law. Her son married, if he could, a girl from a distant
village, an enemy often, whose entrance proved baneful either to the
children of a former marriage, or to the poor mother, who was often
driven away by the stranger wife. You may not think it, but the fact
is certainly so. At the very least she was ill-used; banished from the
fireside, from the very table.

There is a Swiss law forbidding the removal of the mother from her
place by the chimney-corner.

She was exceedingly afraid of her son's marrying. But her lot was
little happier if he did not marry. None the less servant was she of
the young master of the house, who succeeded to all his father's
rights, even to that of beating her. This impious custom I have seen
still followed in the South: a son of five-and-twenty chastising his
mother when she got drunk.

* * * * *

How much greater her suffering in those days of savagery! Then it was
rather he who came back from the feast half-drunken, hardly knowing
what he was about. But one room, but one bed, was all