CHAPTER V.
_The Menagier's Wife_ A PARIS HOUSEWIFE IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY The sphere of woman is the home.
-- _Homo Sapiens_ The men of the middle, as indeed of all ages, including our own, were very fond of writing books of deportment telling women how they ought to behave in all the circumstances of their existence, but more particularly in their relations with their husbands.

Many of these books have survived, and among them one which is of particular interest, because of the robust good sense of its writer and the intimate and lively picture which it gives of a bourgeois home.

Most books of deportment were written, so to speak, in the air, for women in general, but this was written by a particular husband for a particular wife, and thus is drawn from life and full of detail, showing throughout an individuality which its compeers too often lack.

If a parallel be sought to it, it is perhaps to be found not in any other medieval treatise but in those passages of Xenophon's _Economist_, in which Isomachus describes to Socrates the training of a perfect Greek wife.
The Menagier de Paris (the Householder or Goodman of Paris, as we might say) wrote this book for the instruction of his young wife between 1392 and 1394.

He was a wealthy man, not without learning and of great experience in affairs, obviously a member of that solid and enlightened _haute bourgeoisie_, upon which the French monarchy was coming to lean with ever-increasing confidence.