al but more sensitive than man; and, while he can
create everything in the silence of his imagination, she has to live and
suffer everything that she brings into the world. She conceives and
realises with her flesh and with her blood.

A woman said to me, one day:

"If I had to begin life over again, I should not have the courage to
avoid a single danger, pain or disappointment. In surmounting them, I
have gained a power of resistance which forms the framework of my
present and my future. I can see the sparkle of my happiness better when
I keep in the shadow of my sad memories; and all that I accomplish, all
that I write seems to me to flow from my past tears."

To refuse recognition to a woman's work is to refuse to recognise her
soul, her existence and every throb of her heart!...

Man does not know that torture which every true woman suffers when she
feels that those who are listening to her do not hear her real words,
that those who are looking at her do not see what she is making every
effort to show. Even when she is obeying the simplest impulses of her
nature, people distrust what she says and what she does; and in some
women, good and kind and beautiful, we see repeated the artless miracle
of the flowers that exhaust themselves in giving too much fragrance and
too much blossom. How fearful and timid this moral isolation makes us!
And how thrice courageous we must be in the hour of realisation! If
effort sometimes seems useless to men, what about women, who see
themselves ever confronted by a blank wall of scepticism?

A man is valued by the weight of the forces which he stirs up for and
against himself. The forces which woman encounters are nearly all
hostile.

3

I was close upon sixteen. One day, I heard some one say, speaking of
some trifling thing of which I was wrongly suspected:

"She is no longer a child. She's a woman now and she's lying."

That was a cruel speech, the sort of speech that influences a whole
life. My eyes were gradually opened to the dreary injustice that casts
its shadow over the fairest destinies of women. Nothing around them
seems clear and natural. Doubt lies in wait for them, calumny rends
them. Now my hour was coming: my skirts, touching the ground for the
first time, had suggested the suspicion of deceit and hypocrisy.

It was perhaps this wound, inflicted on the soul of the growing girl,
that left the most serious mark on my soul as a woman. Thanks to a
strange prick