The Counsels of Madame Elizabeth

THE sister of Louis XVI, Madame Elizabeth, was a woman of fine psychological acumen and deep nobility of character. She gave this practical advice to one of her ladies in waiting who had recently married.

“Above all seek to please your husband . . . he has good qualities but he can also have some that are not so pleasing. Make it a rule for yourself never to concentrate on these and above all never permit yourself to talk of them; you owe it to him as you owe it to yourself. Try to look at his heart; if you truly possess it, you will always be happy. Make his house agreeable for him; let him always find in it a woman eager to please him, busy with her duties, with her children, and you will in this way win his confidence; when you once have that, you will be able to do, with the mind heaven has given you and a bit of cleverness, anything you wish.”

The outcome is interesting. Everyone knows it. “Man reigns but woman governs.”

“I will do it if God wills it,” said the husband of a rather dictatorial wife.

“Now you are talking nonsense,” said his friend, “why you haven’t even asked your wife’s permission.”

Woman instinctively, and above all when she loves, loves to be docile. Nothing costs her too much and at times she goes to the point of sacrifices extremely taxing for herself if her heart is captive. But at the same time she loves to dominate.

The heroine of a comedy revealed, with exaggeration of course, a trait that is often found in woman. The said heroine had not yet married but she already was engaged in making her fiancée dance to her thirty-six wills and to goad him on with a thousand pin pricks saying, “I prick him, I make him go, I already treat him as my husband.”

Even when they are not so naughty, women by using to advantage their weakness and their charm usually succeed in making their husbands pretty much as they want them.

In his genially caustic style, Emile Faguet used to say, “Women are divided into three classes: those who are inclined to obey sometimes, those who never obey, those who always command.”

Let women never use their power for the egotistic satisfaction of their self-love. Let them rather have in view only God’s glory and, especially in the spiritual government of their home, let them know how to make God’s glory understood as it ought to be. They should be able to gain a hearing in the most vital matters when duty is at stake or when the worship due to God is involved; in other matters let them be ready to yield. They will purchase by their perpetual abnegation in these lesser things the right to be listened to in more important matters and their husbands will realize that when they do resist their wishes it is not because of vanity but because of virtue.