by which Blondet
illustrated his satire.

"This explanation, dear Count Adam," said Blondet, turning to the
Pole, "will have proved to you that the 'perfect lady' represents
the intellectual no less than the political muddle, just as she is
surrounded by the showy and not very lasting products of an industry
which is always aiming at destroying its work in order to replace it by
something else. When you leave her you say to yourself: She certainly
has superior ideas! And you believe it all the more because she will
have sounded your heart with a delicate touch, and have asked you your
secrets; she affects ignorance, to learn everything; there are some
things she never knows, not even when she knows them. You alone will
be uneasy, you will know nothing of the state of her heart. The
great ladies of old flaunted their love-affairs, with newspapers and
advertisements; in these days the lady has her little passion neatly
ruled like a sheet of music with its crotchets and quavers and minims,
its rests, its pauses, its sharps to sign the key. A mere weak women,
she is anxious not to compromise her love, or her husband, or the future
of her children. Name, position, and fortune are no longer flags so
respected as to protect all kinds of merchandise on board. The whole
aristocracy no longer advances in a body to screen the lady. She has
not, like the great lady of the past, the demeanor of lofty antagonism;
she can crush nothing under foot, it is she who would be crushed. Thus
she is apt at Jesuitical _mezzo termine_, she is a creature of equivocal
compromises, of guarded proprieties, of anonymous passions steered
between two reef-bound shores. She is as much afraid of her servants as
an Englishwoman who lives in dread of a trial in the divorce-court. This
woman--so free at a ball, so attractive out walking--is a slave at home;
she is never independent but in perfect privacy, or theoretically. She
must preserve herself in her position as a lady. This is her task.

"For in our day a woman repudiated by her husband, reduced to a meagre
allowance, with no carriage, no luxury, no opera-box, none of the divine
accessories of the toilet, is no longer a wife, a maid, or a townswoman;
she is adrift, and becomes a chattel. The Carmelites will not receive a
married woman; it would be bigamy. Would her lover still have anything
to say to her? That is the question. Thus your perfect lady may perhaps
give occasion to calumny, never to sla