ess apprehension and with a mysterious trouble, he felt
the hour coming which was about to change his life.

XXVI.

OF YOUNG GIRLS IN GENERAL.

"You tell me, Madame, that this description
is neither in the taste of Ovid
nor that of Quinault. I agree, my
dear, but I am not in a humour to
say soft things."

VOLTAIRE (_Dict. Phil._).

The great fault, in my opinion, both of the writer and of the poet, is to
idealize woman too much, and especially the young girl.

On the stage just as in the novel, the heroines are placed on a sort of
pedestal where they receive haughtily the incense and homage of poor
mankind.

They are perfect beings, of superior essence, gifted with all the beauties
and all the virtues, whose white robes of innocence never receive, amidst
all the impurities, of our social state, the slightest splash.

Why then raise thus upon a pedestal of Parian marble these statues of clay?
Why place reverentially beneath a tabernacle of gold these pasteboard
divinities?

Good Heavens! women are women, that is to say: the females of man, nothing
more. They are above all what men make them, and as we are generally
vicious and spoilt, since from the most tender age we take care to defile
ourselves in the street, in the workshop or on the school-benches; as the
atmosphere we breathe is corrupt, we have no claim to believe that our
wives, our sisters and our daughters can remain unspotted by our touch, and
that this same atmosphere which they breathe, will purify itself in passing
through their chaste nostrils.

If then the woman is not worse than we, as some assert, assuredly she is no
better.

And how could they be better, who are our pupils, and when the share we
have given them in society is so slight and so strangely ordered that, if
they cannot by means of supreme efforts expand and grow in it morally and
intellectually, every latitude is allowed them on the other hand to corrupt
themselves in it beyond measure, and to fall lower than the man into the
lowest depths.

"Fools!" said Machiavelli, "you sow hemlock and pretend you see ears of
corn growing ripe."

Why then idealize and make a divinity of this creature, when we know that
the education she ordinarily receives, takes away from her, little by
little, all which remains attractive, divine and ideal!

Certainly a chaste and simple young girl, fair and fresh as a spring
morning, sweet as the perfume of the violet, and whose