If it were worth while to argue a paradox, one might maintain that Nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the superfluity of her world.  Perhaps the best starting-point for study of the Virgin would be a practical acquaintance with bees, and especially with queen bees.  Precisely where the French man may come in, on the genealogical tree of parthenogenesis, one hesitates to say; but certain it is that the French woman, from very early times, has shown qualities peculiar to herself, and that the French woman of the Middle Ages was a masculine character.  Almost any book which deals with the social side of the twelfth century has something to say on this subject, like the following page from M. Garreau’s volume published in 1899, on the “Social State of France during the Crusades":—­

A trait peculiar to this epoch is the close resemblance between the manners of men and women.  The rule that such and such feelings or acts are permitted to one sex and forbidden to the other was not fairly settled.  Men had the right to dissolve in tears, and women that of talking without prudery ....  If we look at their intellectual level, the women appear distinctly superior.  They are more serious; more subtle.  With them we do not seem dealing with the rude state of civilization that their husbands belong to ....  As a rule, the women seem to have the habit of weighing their acts; of not yielding to momentary impressions.  While the sense of Christianity is more developed in them than in their husbands, on the other hand they show more perfidy and art in crime ....  One might doubtless prove by a series of examples that the maternal influence when it predominated in the education of a son gave him a marked superiority over his contemporaries.  Richard Coeur-de-Lion the crowned poet, artist, the king whose noble manners and refined mind in spite of his cruelty exercised so strong an impression on his age, was formed by that brilliant Eleanor of Guienne who, in her struggle with her husband, retained her sons as much as possible within her sphere of influence in order to make party chiefs of them.  Our great Saint Louis, as all know, was brought up exclusively by Blanche of Castile; and Joinville, the charming writer so worthy of Saint Louis’s friendship, and apparently so superior to his surroundings, was also the pupil of a widowed and regent mother.

The superiority of the woman was not a fancy, but a fact.  Man’s business was to fight or hunt or feast or make love.  The man was also the travelling partner in commerce, commonly absent from home for months together, while the woman carried on the business.  The woman ruled the household and the workshop; cared for the economy; supplied the intelligence, and dictated the taste.  Her ascendancy was secured by her alliance with the Church, into which she sent her most intelligent children; and a priest or clerk, for the most part, counted socially as a woman.  Both physically and mentally