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."

There were, in this century, superior women in whom was exhibited a
high form of love, but who realized that perfect love was impossible
in their age; yet they desired to be loved in an intense and
legitimate manner. This phase of womanhood is well represented by
Mlle. Aisse and Mlle. de Lespinasse, both of whom felt an irresistible
need of loving; they proclaimed their love and not only showed
themselves to be capable of loving and of intense suffering, but
proved themselves worthy of love which, in its highest form, they felt
to be an unknown quantity at that time. Their love became a constant
inspiration, a model of devotion, almost a transfiguration of passion.
These women were products of the time; they had to be, to
compensate for the general sterility and barrenness, to equalize the
inequalities, and to pay the tribute of vice and debauch.

All the customs of the age were arrayed against pure womanhood and
offered it nothing but temptation. Inasmuch as the husband belonged
to court and to war more than to domestic felicity, he left his wife
alone for long periods. The husbands themselves seemed actually to
enjoy the infidelity of their wives and were often intimate friends of
their wives