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There was the ripe sphere, within reach; and I took it. But when I got it, and began to live with it, I found out my mistake. It was a mariage de convenance there'd been no wooing, no winning.
And Cecil felt as if he were a strange, newly-invented kind of criminal. Either, he said to himself, he was playing with the feelings of this dear, beautiful creature, or he was drifting into a mariage de convenance, a vulgar and mercenary speculation, while all the time he was madly devoted to someone else. He felt guilty, anxious, and furious with Eugenia.
No man or woman is perfect; no one can expect to find a wholly ideal mate; it is foolish to be too exacting, and it is conceited, implying that one is flawless one's self. Nevertheless, the counsel of caution is more commonly needed. Happily we have pretty generally got away from mariages de convenance, marriages for money, or title, or other extraneous advantages.
Their mission is not, as might be supposed, to promote mariages de convenance between English Staff officers and French ladies, but to transmit billets-doux between the two Armies and, generally, to promote the amenities of military intercourse. As a rule they are charming fellows, chosen with a very proper eye to their personal qualities as well as their proficiency in the English language.
No wise person, we imagine, wishes to restore the social condition of France in the seventeenth century, or considers the ideal programme of woman’s life to be a marriage de convenance at fifteen, a career of gallantry from twenty to eight-and-thirty, and penitence and piety for the rest of her days.
The packet, however, I did read; and it consisted of a series of letters between Talbot and his father, who had engaged him to a young lady of rank and fortune, without consulting him un mariage de convenance which Talbot had resisted in consequence of his attachment to Clara.
"But I thought you were," said Crosbie. "No; not at all as you are. You are an accepted lover, and will be allowed to do anything, whip the creams, and tune the piano, if you know how. I'm only a half sort of lover, meditating a mariage de convenance to oblige an uncle, and by no means required by the terms of my agreement to undergo a very rigid amount of drill.
"It distilled dignity, la convenance, and formality," says the Marquise de Crequi, who relates an anecdote that aptly illustrates the glamour which surrounded talent at that time. She was taken by her grandmother to see Mlle.
Slowly she raised her head. The touch of his hands was almost more than she could bear, but she steadied her trembling lips and met his gaze bravely as he spoke again. "If you will agree to this this mariage de convenance, I will do all that lies in my power to make your life happy. You will be free in everything.
Modern opinion is shocked by a discrepancy in age between husband and wife, with which the Middle Ages, a time of ménages de convenance, was more familiar. 'Seldom, the Ménagier says, 'will you see ever so old a man who will not marry a young woman. Yet his attitude towards his young wife shows us that there may have been compensations, even in a marriage between May and January.
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