ultitudes of trades-women who
sit all day long between the cradle and the sugar-cask, farmers' wives
and daughters who milk the cows, unfortunate women who are employed like
beasts of burden in the manufactories, who all day long carry the loaded
basket, the hoe and the fish-crate, if unfortunately there exist these
common human beings to whom the life of the soul, the benefits of
education, the delicious tempests of the heart are an unattainable
heaven; and if Nature has decreed that they should have coracoid
processes and hyoid bones and thirty-two vertebrae, let them remain for
the physiologist classed with the ourang-outang. And here we make no
stipulations for the leisure class; for those who have the time and
the sense to fall in love; for the rich who have purchased the right
of indulging their passions; for the intellectual who have conquered a
monopoly of fads. Anathema on all those who do not live by thought. We
say Raca and fool to all those who are not ardent, young, beautiful
and passionate. This is the public expression of that secret sentiment
entertained by philanthropists who have learned to read and can keep
their own carriage. Among the nine millions of the proscribed, the
tax-gatherer, the magistrate, the law-maker and the priest doubtless see
living souls who are to be ruled and made subject to the administration
of justice. But the man of sentiment, the philosopher of the boudoir,
while he eats his fine bread, made of corn, sown and harvested by these
creatures, will reject them and relegate them, as we do, to a place
outside the genus Woman. For them, there are no women excepting those
who can inspire love; and there is no living being but the creature
invested with the priesthood of thought by means of a privileged
education, and with whom leisure has developed the power of imagination;
in other words that only is a human being whose soul dreams, in love,
either of intellectual enjoyments or of physical delights.

We would, however, make the remark that these nine million female
pariahs produce here and there a thousand peasant girls who from
peculiar circumstances are as fair as Cupids; they come to Paris or to
the great cities and end up by attaining the rank of _femmes comme
il faut_; but to set off against these two or three thousand favored
creatures, there are one hundred thousand others who remain servants
or abandon themselves to frightful irregularities. Nevertheless, we
are obliged to c