ubject.

XV.
Morally the man is more often and longer a man than the woman is a
women.

On the other hand we ought to consider that among these two millions of
celibates there are many unhappy men, in whom a profound sense of their
misery and persistent toil have quenched the instinct of love;

That they have not all passed through college, that there are many
artisans among them, many footmen--the Duke of Gevres, an extremely
plain and short man, as he walked through the park of Versailles saw
several lackeys of fine appearance and said to his friends, "Look how
these fellows are made by us, and how they imitate us"--that there are
many contractors, many trades people who think of nothing but money;
many drudges of the shop;

That there are men more stupid and actually more ugly than God would
have made them;

That there are those whose character is like a chestnut without a
kernel;

That the clergy are generally chaste;

That there are men so situated in life that they can never enter the
brilliant sphere in which honest women move, whether for want of a coat,
or from their bashfulness, or from the failure of a mahout to introduce
them.

But let us leave to each one the task of adding to the number of these
exceptions in accordance with his personal experience--for the object
of a book is above all things to make people think--and let us instantly
suppress one-half of the sum total and admit only that there are one
million of hearts worthy of paying homage to honest women. This number
approximately includes those who are superior in all departments. Women
love only the intellectual, but justice must be done to virtue.

As for these amiable celibates, each of them relates a string of
adventures, all of which seriously compromise honest women. It would be
a very moderate and reserved computation to attribute no more than three
adventures to each celibate; but if some of them count their adventures
by the dozen, there are many more who confine themselves to two or three
incidents of passion and some to a single one in their whole life,
so that we have in accordance with the statistical method taken the
average. Now if the number of celibates be multiplied by the number of
their excesses in love the result will be three millions of adventures;
to set against this we have only four hundred thousand honest women!

If the God of goodness and