, gallantry, the fairy life
of love, the secrecy of passion, the profound ecstasy of the soul, the
sweet feelings of melancholy and the constancy of love.

These two systems, starting from opposite points of the globe, have
come into collision in France; in France, where one part of the country,
Languedoc, was attracted by Oriental traditions, while the other,
Languedoil, was the native land of a creed which attributes to woman
a magical power. In the Languedoil, love necessitates mystery, in the
Languedoc, to see is to love.

At the height of this struggle came the triumphant entry of Christianity
into France, and there it was preached by women, and there it
consecrated the divinity of a woman who in the forests of Brittany, of
Vendee and of Ardennes took, under the name of Notre-Dame, the place of
more than one idol in the hollow of old Druidic oaks.

If the religion of Christ, which is above all things a code of morality
and politics, gave a soul to all living beings, proclaimed that equality
of all in the sight of God, and by such principles as these
fortified the chivalric sentiments of the North, this advantage was
counterbalanced by the fact, that the sovereign pontiff resided at
Rome, of which seat he considered himself the lawful heir, through the
universality of the Latin tongue, which became that of Europe during the
Middle Ages, and through the keen interest taken by monks, writers and
lawyers in establishing the ascendency of certain codes, discovered by a
soldier in the sack of Amalfi.

These two principles of the servitude and the sovereignty of women
retain possession of the ground, each of them defended by fresh
arguments.

The Salic law, which was a legal error, was a triumph for the principle
of political and civil servitude for women, but it did not diminish the
power which French manners accorded them, for the enthusiasm of chivalry
which prevailed in Europe supplanted the party of manners against the
party of law.

And in this way was created that strange phenomenon which since that
time has characterized both our national despotism and our legislation;
for ever since those epochs which seemed to presage the Revolution,
when the spirit of philosophy rose and reflected upon the history of
the past, France has been the prey of many convulsions. Feudalism, the
Crusades, the Reformation, the struggle between the monarchy and the
aristocracy. Despotism and Priestcraft have so closely held the cou