d the wittiest women in the world are found at Paris, where women
never read;

That women are like people of quality who, according to Mascarillo,
know everything without having learned anything; that a woman while
she is dancing, or while she is playing cards, without even having the
appearance of listening, ought to know how to pick up from the
conversation of talented men the ready-made phrases out of which fools
manufacture their wit at Paris;

That in this country decisive judgments on men and affairs are passed
round from hand to hand; and that the little cutting phrase with which
a woman criticises an author, demolishes a work, or heaps contempt on
a picture, has more power in the world than a court decision;

That women are beautiful mirrors, which naturally reflect the most
brilliant ideas;

That natural wit is everything, and the best education is gained
rather from what we learn in the world than by what we read in books;

That, above all, reading ends in making the eyes dull, etc.

To think of leaving a woman at liberty to read the books which her
character of mind may prompt her to choose! This is to drop a spark in
a powder magazine; it is worse than that, it is to teach your wife to
separate herself from you; to live in an imaginary world, in a
Paradise. For what do women read? Works of passion, the _Confessions_
of Rousseau, romances, and all those compositions which work most
powerfully on their sensibility. They like neither argument nor the
ripe fruits of knowledge. Now have you ever considered the results
which follow these poetical readings?

Romances, and indeed all works of imagination, paint sentiments and
events with colors of a very different brilliancy from those presented
by nature. The fascination of such works springs less from the desire
which each author feels to show his skill in putting forth choice and
delicate ideas than from the mysterious working of the human
intellect. It is characteristic of man to purify and refine everything
that he lays up in the treasury of his thoughts. What human faces,
what monuments of the dead are not made more beautiful than actual
nature in the artistic representation? The soul of the reader assists
in this conspiracy against the truth, either by means of the profound
silence which it enjoys in reading or by the fire of mental conception
with which it is agitated or by the clearness with which imagery is
reflected in the mirror of the understand