sex:--

Diderot.--How do you define woman?

Galiana.--An animal naturally feeble and sick.

Diderot.--Feeble? Has she not as much courage as man?

Galiana.--Do you know what courage is? It is the effect of terror. You
let your leg be cut off, because you are afraid of dying. Wise people
are never courageous--they are prudent--that is to say, poltroons.

Diderot.--Why call you woman naturally sick!

Galiana.--Like all animals, she is sick until she attains her perfect
growth. Then she has a peculiar symptom which takes up the fifth part
of her time. Then come breeding and nursing, two long and troublesome
complaints. In short, they have only intervals of health, until
they turn a certain corner, and then _elles ne sont plus de malades
peut-etre--elles ne sont que des reilles_.

Diderot.--Observe her at a ball, no vigor, then, M. l'Abbe?

Galiana.--Stop the fiddles! put out the lights! she will scarcely crawl
to her coach.

Diderot.--See her in love.

Galiana.--It is painful to see anybody in a fever.

Diderot.--M. l'Abbe, have you no faith in education?

Galiana.--Not so much as in instinct. A woman is habitually ill. She is
affectionate, engaging, irritable, capricious, easily offended, easily
appeased, a trifle amuses her. The imagination is always in play. Fear,
hope, joy, despair, and disgust, follow each other more rapidly, are
manifested more strongly, effaced more quickly, than with us. They like
a plentiful repose, at intervals company; anything for excitement. Ask
the doctor if it is not the same with his patients. But ask yourself,
do we not all treat them as we do sick people, lavish attention, soothe,
flatter, caress, and get tired of them?

Condorcet, in a letter, remarking on the above conversation, says:--"I
do not insist upon it as probable that woman will ever be Euler
or Voltaire; but I am satisfied that she may one day be Pascal or
Rousseau." This very qualification, we consider, is sufficient to
absolve Condorcet from, the charge of being a "woman hater." His
opponents, when driven from every other source, have fallen back on
this, and alleged that he viewed the sexes as unequal, and that the
stronger had a right to lord it over the weaker. But which is the
weaker? Euler and Voltaire were masculine men. A woman to be masculine,
in the true sense of the word, is an anomaly, to be witnessed with pain.
She is not in a normal condition. She is a monster. Women should live in
society full