mind and body alike
are as pure as the petals of a half-opened lily, is the most heavenly and
the most adorable thing in the world.

But, outside the pages of your novel, how many of them have you met in the
world?

I have often heard the modest virtues of the middle classes extolled, and
it is from such surroundings that the novelist of to-day most frequently
draws his feminine ideal. It is among the middle classes indeed that all
the qualifications seem to unite at first. It is the intermediate
condition, the most happy of all, as the excellent Monsieur Daru said in
1820, since it is only disinherited of the highest favours of fortune, and
the social and intellectual advantages of it are accessible to a reasonable
ambition.

But they evidently benefit very little by their advantages, for I, and you
also, have always found them coquettish, ignorant, frivolous and vain,
bringing up their children very badly, but in revenge, generally deceiving
their husbands very well.

"In middle-class households, bickering; among fashionable people, adultery.
In fashionable middle-class households, either one or the other and
sometimes both."[1]

And how could it be otherwise?

The daughters of devout and consequently narrow-minded and ignorant
mothers, of sceptical and libertine fathers, they spend five or six years
at school, where they consummate the loss of what may have escaped the
baneful example of their family.

They have taken from their mother foolish vanity, ridiculous prejudices,
the art of lying; from their father scepticism and an elastic conscience;
perhaps they will preserve their virtue and modesty? The pernicious
contacts of the school soon carry them away.

They still have a blush on their face, a down-cast eye, a timid bearing.
But their affected timidity is the token of their knowledge of _good and
evil_; like Eve, if they have not yet tasted of the forbidden fruit, they
burn to taste it, for their thought is sullied, their imagination is
vagrant and at the bottom of their soul there is a germ of corruption.

They leave the boarding-school _virgins_, but chaste, never.

Let us then represent the world as it la, women such as they are, and not
such as they ought to be; let us call things by their names, and when there
is moral deformity somewhere, let us show that deformity.

When we make wonders of the heroines of a novel, possessing the charms of
the _three Graces_ and the virtues of the seven sages