How to Create the Perfect Wife (16 page)

Confident that he could stand, godlike, between his two foundlings in their brutal and ignorant natural state and the appalling destiny that
awaited them if they were left to the mercy of society’s corrupting influences, Day embarked on their syllabus with gusto. While he had obviously lost much time in starting the girls’ education at the ages of eleven and twelve, he was undeterred, for Rousseau himself had remarked: “Give me a child of twelve who knows nothing at all; I should return him at fifteen as knowledgeable as the child you have instructed from the earliest age.” And of course while Rousseau had detailed an educational program for boys from babyhood to manhood in minute detail, he had made plain that the education of girls needed far less attention and labor.

In fact, the method Day hit upon to train his two foundlings in Avignon was a hybrid of his own making, which combined Rousseau’s approach for Émile and Sophie. Like the fictional Sophie, the girls were taught to read and perform simple arithmetic—skills they had already begun in their schoolrooms at the Foundling Hospital, and for the first time were taught to write. And since Day was adamant that his future wife should serve his every domestic need, the girls were encouraged to cook, clean and wait upon their teacher as willing little helpmates just like Sophie. With little if any help from servants, and certainly none speaking English, the girls were therefore responsible for the bulk of the housework: sweeping, mopping, swilling, cleaning grates, making fires, fetching water, cooking, washing dishes, laundering, mending clothes and countless other menial tasks. But since Day detested the usual social graces that were prized in young girls within well-heeled families, unlike Sophie the orphans did not study a musical instrument or dance the latest steps or take any interest in clothes. Unlike Sophie, they would not be moulded into life-size versions of little dolls.

At the same time, Day was eager that his future wife—whichever of the two girls she might be—should be able to converse with him on weighty matters with intellectual interest. And so he adopted the curriculum that Rousseau laid down for Émile in order to teach the girls the basic principles of geography, physics and astronomy through the pioneering method of practical demonstration and experiment. The girls were therefore encouraged to work out the movement of the earth by observing the rising and setting of the sun over the Avignon rooftops and to discern the pattern of the seasons by studying the moon and stars in the dense black Provençal night sky.

Both of the girls proved obliging pupils. With their heads bent over their letters and numbers, their chestnut curls and blond locks falling respectively over their books, Sabrina and Lucretia worked hard at their lessons. Their eyes widening in amazement as Day revealed the marvels of the natural world in homespun experiments on the dining table or field trips around the walled city, they progressed in their studies as the days shortened. But at the same time Day’s lessons also included lectures on all the corrupt vices of society—especially appertaining to women—that he most despised.

“He taught them by slow degrees to read and write,” wrote Edgeworth, “by continually talking to them, by reasoning, which appeared to me to be above their comprehension, and by ridicule, the taste for which might afterwards be turned against himself, he endeavoured to imbue them with a deep hatred for dress, and luxury, and fine people, and fashion, and titles.” And before the end of the year, as evidence of his pupils’ achievements, Day proudly included in his correspondence with Edgeworth an extraordinary letter, written in his own hand but “word for word” dictated by twelve-year-old Sabrina.

“Dear Mr. Edgeworth,” the letter began, “I am glad to hear you are well, and your little boy—I love Mr. Day dearly, and Lucretia—I am learning to write—I do not like France as well as England—the people are very brown, they dress very oddly—the climate is very good here.” Having dutifully imbibed her teacher’s disdain for all things French, Sabrina continued: “I hope I shall have more sense
against
[by the time that] I come to England—I know how to make a circle and an
equilateral
triangle—I know the cause of night and day, winter and summer.” And if any doubts of her appreciation for her teacher lingered, the letter ended: “I love Mr. Day best in the world, Mr. Bicknell next, and you next.” The letter, Day assured his friend, was a “faithful display of her heart and head.” Despite Day’s efforts, Sabrina was not yet able to write herself, but it was the first expression of her own voice. There was no accompanying letter from Lucretia, however, to display her end-of-term progress.

Throughout the mild Mediterranean winter, the girls were kept diligently to their lessons, emerging periodically from the house to trail after their tutor on excursions around the town when Day would point out objects of scholarly interest or denounce the Gallic vices they passed along
the way. Not surprisingly, the two English beauties with their blond and chestnut hair caused quite a stir as they trooped through the stepped streets and around the ramparts behind their gawky young teacher. According to Edgeworth, Day “excited much surprise by his mode of life, and by his opinions” in Avignon—although it was perhaps his ménage-à-trois that really excited the surprise. Just like his indulgent English friends, however, Day’s French hosts displayed a remarkable tolerance for his strange mission. Their initial shock was “soon removed,” wrote Edgeworth, by Day’s “simplicity of conduct, uncommon generosity, and excellent understanding” so that “both he and his pupils were treated with kindness and civility by the principal people in Avignon.” As before, on his hikes around England, Day’s liberal dispensing of alms soon suppressed any questioning looks or ribald comments.

Although there is no evidence that Day went beyond the customary duties of a schoolteacher in grooming his two young girls, he did not present himself as the most responsible guardian for them, either. On one excursion beyond the city walls, he hired a boat to take himself and the girls across the Rhône. Since the famed nineteen-arch bridge of the old French folk song, “Sur le pont d’Avignon,” had long since collapsed into the turbulent river, the only way to cross was by ferry. During winter, when the Rhône flowed notoriously fast and furious, even experienced boatmen would rarely attempt the perilous crossing. Day, however, was undeterred, but soon after he pushed off from the Avignon bank, his boat was caught in the current and capsized midstream so that the three were thrown into the torrent. Since neither girl could swim, both flailed helplessly as they were swept downriver. Luckily, Day was a strong swimmer, and he managed to drag both of the girls to the bank though not without “difficulty and danger to himself.”

In an almost equally reckless escapade, Day took umbrage when he heard that a French army officer had spoken to his pupils “with too great freedom” one day when they were out for a stroll on their own. It was fine for Day to assume proprietorial rights over the girls but not for a stranger to make advances toward them. Storming out of the house, he confronted the officer with a pair of pistols, declaring that “he was ready to defend their minds, as he would their persons, from insult, at the hazard of his
life.” Challenging a seasoned soldier to a duel was foolhardy to say the least, especially since French rules of etiquette dictated that honor could only be satisfied with the death of one of the duelists. Evidently Day did not stop to think what would happen to the orphans if their protector was killed. Fortunately for Day, and his charges, the officer gallantly backed down and assured the Englishman that he had had no intention of offending.

As he tutored the girls throughout the winter of 1769 to 1770, Day silently monitored their progress. Every day as Sabrina and Lucretia labored over their lessons, carried out their chores and listened to their teacher’s monologues on politics or fashion, Day assessed their intelligence, their readiness to learn and—especially—their willingness to bend to his command. With his particular views on dress, comportment and demeanor, Day noted how each of the girls spoke, moved, drank, ate and behaved as measured against his desired ideal. Alert to any signs of coquetry, vigilant for any hint of defiance, all the time he was making up his mind which of the two would best fulfill the role of his future wife. Naturally, he was weighing up their different appearances too; no matter how unworldly Day might appear he could hardly ignore their contrasting attributes. He had pledged, in the contract with Bicknell made in the summer of 1769, to decide within twelve months which of the orphans he would marry and discard her companion. He knew that before long he would have to make this choice. Would he choose auburn-haired and brown-eyed Sabrina or blond and blue-eyed Lucretia? Who would be the lucky winner of the undeclared contest to become Mrs. Day?

Like Pygmalion sculpting his ivory girl, Day naturally desired a woman who fitted the ideals of feminine beauty of the time. With the Georgians’ reverence for the ancient Greeks and Romans, the perfect eighteenth-century woman looked remarkably similar to the classical ideal. Perfectly proportioned, like a statue of a Greek or Roman goddess, the sublime eighteenth-century woman possessed ivory-white skin—any hint of sun-tan suggested an unseemly life of labor—with rounded arms, a shapely figure, a slender waist, a long, graceful neck and an oval face. Her hair should be luxuriant and flowing, her nose fine and aquiline, her eyebrows delicately arched, her lips full and her eyes large, shining and expressive.

Eighteenth-century artists and sculptors who depicted Galatea at the moment she descends from her pedestal toward a waiting Pygmalion strove to reproduce this image of feminine perfection. In most representations Galatea is simultaneously girlish and innocent, with long, loose hair and a slim, hairless body, and yet sexually arousing at a time when most respectable women were covered from head to toe. Almost naked, like Eve in the Garden of Eden, she stretches out her hands in innocent invitation and smiles in sinful compliance. She is both chaste—with her eyes downcast and her lower half discreetly veiled—and completely available.

When in 1763 the French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet unveiled his marble sculpture of a kneeling Pygmalion enraptured at the moment that Galatea leans down from her pedestal toward him, visitors were overawed. Denis Diderot—one of the era’s three great Francophone philosophers, along with Voltaire and Rousseau—declared the sculpture to be so lifelike that he urged spectators to touch the marble and feel it “yield to your pressure.” Indeed, the cult of the living statue had an impact on a friend of Day’s: her sister’s suitor suddenly lost interest in her when he met a woman who resembled a statue of Venus. Upon marrying the woman, said the friend, he obtained his
“breathing
Statue.”

Day’s specifications for his paragon of womanhood had much in common with the idealized Galatea. He favored ivory skin and round, white arms as much as the next man. But in addition, his “breathing statue” must wear plain and simple dress, with her hair left long and natural, her face devoid of makeup and her body unadorned by jewels or ribbons, just like the country girl of his romantic poetry. Edgeworth summed up his friend’s singular recipe for the perfect wife with typical aplomb: “Mr. Day had an unconquerable horror of the empire of fashion over the minds of women; simplicity, perfect innocence, and attachment to himself, were at that time the only qualifications which he desired in a wife.”

But at the ages of eleven and twelve, still growing and developing daily, hardly out of childhood and only just approaching puberty, Lucretia and Sabrina presented a conundrum. It was no easy task to predict which of them might mature into the beautiful woman of his dreams or develop the ideal characteristics of his lifelong companion. As he turned from one girl to the other, Day felt helpless to decide.

Day’s friends and acquaintances would make much of the fact that Sabrina and Lucretia possessed equally alluring but contrasting styles of beauty. To make Day’s dilemma worse, the girls had equally pleasing but completely opposite characters too. So although he found himself drawn toward plump, fair-haired Lucretia with her sunny, jolly personality, he was also attracted to slender, chestnut-haired Sabrina with her quieter, more reserved nature and her eagerness to learn. What was a man to do? As the orange trees began to blossom in the surrounding fields in spring 1770, Day knew that he had to make a decision.

Slowly, gradually but decisively, one of the girls edged steadily ahead of the other in Day’s secret talent contest. Since there was nothing to distinguish between the two pupils on looks, the contest hinged on their application to Day’s lessons and their willingness to bow to his whims. As might have been predicted from her eager and obedient letter, which she had dictated to Day for Edgeworth, it was twelve-year-old Sabrina who showed the greater aptitude for learning. Her days laboring over her alphabet and numbers in the Shrewsbury schoolroom had not been wasted. Naturally bright and eager to advance, Sabrina blossomed under the care of her personal tutor.

With Sabrina, said one acquaintance, Day found “all of his projects were completely successful” while Lucretia demonstrated “not a single bit of progress in any study or any perseverance.” Or as Edgeworth put it, no doubt repeating Day’s own blunt assessment, Lucretia proved “invincibly stupid.” According to Edgeworth, Day found that she was “at the best not disposed to follow his regimen.” No matter how hard or carefully he chiseled, Lucretia remained a cold, dull block of marble.

Whether blond Lucretia was really quite so dumb as her tutor had concluded—or was simply rebelling against her teacher’s methods and demands—remains open to question. Far away from familiar surroundings, fed up with foreigners gawping and gossiping about her and traumatized by her drenching in the Rhône, she had probably had quite enough of her irregular schooling arrangements. Yet if Lucretia was apparently impervious to his educational skills, her eyes wandering around the makeshift schoolroom in boredom, Sabrina plainly had eyes only for him. After all, she had already exclaimed: “I love Mr. Day best in the world.” It was Sabrina,
therefore, whom Day selected to become his child bride. Neither of the girls had any knowledge of their teacher’s agonizing choice, of course, but whether they were entirely innocent of the competition for his attention is another question.