her lover will find a new one on the spot; but this
discount being much more uncertain than the preceding one, we will
estimate it at one-fortieth.

These several rebates will reduce our sum total to eight hundred
thousand women, when we come to calculate the number of those who are
likely to violate married faith. Who would not at the present moment
wish to retain the persuasion that wives are virtuous? Are they not
the supreme flower of the country? Are they not all blooming creatures,
fascinating the world by their beauty, their youth, their life and their
love? To believe in their virtue is a sort of social religion, for they
are the ornament of the world, and form the chief glory of France.

It is in the midst of this million we are bound to investigate:

The number of honest women;

The number of virtuous women.

The work of investigating this and of arranging the results under two
categories requires whole meditations, which may serve as an appendix to
the present one.

MEDITATION III. OF THE HONEST WOMAN.

The preceding meditation has proved that we possess in France a floating
population of one million women reveling in the privilege of inspiring
those passions which a gallant man avows without shame, or dissembles
with delight. It is then among this million of women that we must carry
our lantern of Diogenes in order to discover the honest women of the
land.

This inquiry suggests certain digressions.

Two young people, well dressed, whose slender figures and rounded arms
suggest a paver's tool, and whose boots are elegantly made, meet one
morning on the boulevard, at the end of the Passage des Panoramas.

"What, is this you?"

"Yes, dear boy; it looks like me, doesn't it?"

Then they laugh, with more or less intelligence, according to the nature
of the joke which opens the conversation.

When they have examined each other with the sly curiosity of a police
officer on the lookout for a clew, when they are quite convinced of the
newness of each other's gloves, of each other's waistcoat and of the
taste with which their cravats are tied; when they are pretty certain
that neither of them is down in the world, they link arms and if they
start from the Theater des Varietes, they have not reached Frascati's
before they have asked each other a roundabout question whose free
translation may be this:

"Whom are you living with now?"

As a general rule she is a charming woman.

Who is the infa