display.

Nevertheless, if marriage in France is an unlimited contract to which
men agree with a silent understanding that they may thus give more
relish to passion, more curiosity, more mystery to love, more
fascination to women; if a woman is rather an ornament to the
drawing-room, a fashion-plate, a portmanteau, than a being whose
functions in the order politic are an essential part of the country's
prosperity and the nation's glory, a creature whose endeavors in life
vie in utility with those of men--I admit that all the above theory,
all these long considerations sink into nothingness at the prospect of
such an important destiny!----

But after having squeezed a pound of actualities in order to obtain
one drop of philosophy, having paid sufficient homage to that passion
for the historic, which is so dominant in our time, let us turn our
glance upon the manners of the present period. Let us take the cap and
bells and the coxcomb of which Rabelais once made a sceptre, and let
us pursue the course of this inquiry without giving to one joke more
seriousness than comports with it, and without giving to serious
things the jesting tone which ill befits them.

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by Honore de Balzac

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