y!

Should we make the conjecture that certain honest women act in dividing
up the celibates, as the lion in the fable did? What! Surely, in that
case, half at least of our altars would become whited sepulchres!

Ought one to suggest for the honor of French ladies that in the time of
peace all other countries should import into France a certain number of
their honest women, and that these countries should mainly consist of
England, Germany and Russia? But the European nations would in that
case attempt to balance matters by demanding that France should export a
certain number of her pretty women.

Morality and religion suffer so much from such calculations as this,
that an honest man, in an attempt to prove the innocence of married
women, finds some reason to believe that dowagers and young people are
half of them involved in this general corruption, and are liars even
more truly than are the celibates.

But to what conclusion does our calculation lead us? Think of our
husbands, who to the disgrace of morals behave almost all of them like
celibates and glory _in petto_ over their secret adventures.

Why, then we believe that every married man, who is at all attached
to his wife from honorable motives, can, in the words of the elder
Corneille, seek a rope and a nail; _foenum habet in cornu_.

It is, however, in the bosom of these four hundred thousand honest women
that we must, lantern in hand, seek for the number of the virtuous women
in France! As a matter of fact, we have by our statistics of marriage so
far only set down the number of those creatures with which society has
really nothing to do. Is it not true that in France the honest people,
the people _comme il faut_, form a total of scarcely three million
individuals, namely, our one million of celibates, five hundred thousand
honest women, five hundred thousand husbands, and a million of dowagers,
of infants and of young girls?

Are you then astonished at the famous verse of Boileau? This verse
proves that the poet had cleverly fathomed the discovery mathematically
propounded to you in these tiresome meditations and that his language is
by no means hyperbolical.

Nevertheless, virtuous women there certainly are:

Yes, those who have never been tempted and those who die at their first
child-birth, assuming that their husbands had married them virgins;

Yes, those who are ugly as the Kaifakatadary of the Arabian Nights;

Yes, those whom Mirabeau calls "