of champagne, _ivresse d'esprit_, and eloquence, she was taught and
saw the corruption of society and marriage, the disrespect to modesty;
in such an atmosphere all trace of innocence was destroyed. She was
taught that faithfulness to a husband belonged only to the people,
that it was an evidence of stupidity. Manners, customs, and even
religion were against the preservation of innocence and purity; and in
this depravity the abbes were the leaders.

Such conditions were dangerous and disastrous not to young girls
only, they affected the young men also; the latter, amidst this
social demoralization, developed their evil tendencies, and, in a few
generations, there was formed a Paris completely debauched. Love meant
nothing more elevated than desire; for man, the paramount idea was
to have or possess; for woman, to capture. There was no longer any
mystery, any secret; the lover left his carriage at the door of
his love, as if to publish his good fortune; he regularly made his
appearance at her house, at the hour of the toilette, at dinner and at
all the fetes; the public announcement of the liaison was made at the
theatre when he sat in her box.

There came a period when so-called love fell so low that woman no
longer questioned a man's birth, rank, or condition, and vice versa,
as long as he or she was in demand; a successful man had nearly every
woman of prominence at his feet. The men planned their attacks upon
the women whom they desired, and the women connived, posed, and set
most ingenious traps and devised most extraordinary means to captivate
their hero. As the century wore on and the vices and appetites
gradually consumed the healthy tissues, there sprang up a class of
monsters, most accomplished _roues_, consummate leaders of theoretical
and practical immorality, who were without conscience. To gain their
ends, they manipulated every medium--valets, chambermaids, scandal,
charity; their one object was to dishonor woman.

Women were no better; "a natural falseness, an acquired dissimulation,
a profound observation, a lie without flinching, a penetrating eye,
a domination of the senses--to these they owed their faculties and
qualities so much feared at the time, and which made them professional
and consummate politicians and ministers. Along with their gallantry,
they possessed a calmness, a tone of liberty, a cynicism; these were
their weapons and deadly ones they were to the man at whom they were
aimed."

T