1 month agoThis weekend I bought an awesome old copy of Honoré de Balzac’s The Physiology of Marriage. Because I adore antiquated notions of intergender dynamics, I am pretty excited about reading it (after, of course, I finish devouring The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat). Here is a list of what qualifies someone as an “honest woman”:
I. An honest woman is necessarily a married woman.
II. An honest woman is under forty years old.
III. A married woman whose favors are to be paid for is not an honest woman.
IV. A married woman who keeps a private carriage is an honest woman.
V. A woman who does her own cooking is not an honest woman.
VI. When a man has made enough to yield an income of twenty thousand francs, his wife is an honest woman, whatever the business in which his fortune was made.
VII. A woman who says “letter of change” for letter of exchange, who says of a man, “He is an elegant gentleman,” can never be an honest woman, whatever fortune she possesses.
VIII. An honest woman ought to be in a financial condition such as forbids her lover to think she will ever cost him anything.
IX. A woman who lives on the third story of any street excepting the Rue de Rivoli and the Rue de Castiglione is not an honest woman.
X. The wife of a banker is always an honest woman, but the woman who sits at the cashier’s desk cannot be one, unless her husband has a very large business and she does not live over his shop.
XI. The unmarried niece of a bishop when she lives with him can pass for an honest woman, because if she has an intrigue she has to deceive her uncle.
XII. An honest woman is one whom her lover fears to compromise.
XIII. The wife of an artist is always an honest woman.