and all the country is the town.

However lofty, beautiful, and clever a girl born in any department of
France may be on entering life, if, like Dinah Piedefer, she marries
in the country and remains there, she inevitably becomes the provincial
woman. In spite of every determination, the commonplace of second-rate
ideas, indifference to dress, the culture of vulgar people, swamp the
sublimer essence hidden in the youthful plant; all is over, it falls
into decay. How should it be otherwise? From their earliest years
girls bred in the country see none but provincials; they cannot imagine
anything superior, their choice lies among mediocrities; provincial
fathers marry their daughters to provincial sons; crossing the races is
never thought of, and the brain inevitably degenerates, so that in many
country towns intellect is as rare as the breed is hideous. Mankind
becomes dwarfed in mind and body, for the fatal principle of conformity
of fortune governs every matrimonial alliance. Men of talent, artists,
superior brains--every bird of brilliant plumage flies to Paris. The
provincial woman, inferior in herself, is also inferior through
her husband. How is she to live happy under this crushing twofold
consciousness?

But there is a third and terrible element besides her congenital and
conjugal inferiority which contributes to make the figure arid and
gloomy; to reduce it, narrow it, distort it fatally. Is not one of the
most flattering unctions a woman can lay to her soul the assurance of
being something in the existence of a superior man, chosen by herself,
wittingly, as if to have some revenge on marriage, wherein her tastes
were so little consulted? But if in the country the husbands are
inferior beings, the bachelors are no less so. When a provincial wife
commits her "little sin," she falls in love with some so-called handsome
native, some indigenous dandy, a youth who wears gloves and is supposed
to ride well; but she knows at the bottom of her soul that her fancy
is in pursuit of the commonplace, more or less well dressed. Dinah was
preserved from this danger by the idea impressed upon her of her own
superiority. Even if she had not been as carefully guarded in her early
married life as she was by her mother, whose presence never weighed upon
her till the day when she wanted to be rid of it, her pride, and her
high sense of her own destinies, would have protected her. Flattered as
she was to find herself surrounded by