"What can be more inconsistent than the opinion of Diderot, who pretends that, to write to woman, one has only to dip his pen in the rainbow, and sprinkle the writing with dust from butterflies' wings? Women might reply to the philosopher: Your civilization persecutes us as soon as we obey nature; we are obliged to assume a fictitious character and to listen to impulses contrary to our desires. To give us a relish for this doctrine, you are forced to bring in play deceitful illusions and language, as you do with respect to the soldier whom you cradle in laurels and immortality to divert his thoughts from his wretched condition. If he were truly happy, he would welcome the plain and truthful language which you take care not to address to him. It is the same with women; if they were free and happy, they would be less eager for illusions and cajoleries, and it would no longer be necessary in writing to them to place rainbows and butterflies' wings under contribution. "When it (Philosophy) rails at the vices of women, it criticises itself; this it is that produces these vices by a social system which, repressing their faculties from their infancy and through the whole course of their life, forces them to have recourse to fraud in order to yield to nature. "To attempt to judge of women by the vicious character which they display in civilization is like attempting to judge of human nature by the character of the Russian peasant, who is destitute of all ideas of honor and liberty; or like judging the beaver by the stupidity which they show when domesticated, whilst in a condition of liberty combined with labor, they become the most intelligent of all quadrupeds. The same contrast will reign between the women who are slaves of civilization and those who are free in the combined order; they will surpass men in industrial devotion, in loyalty, in nobleness; but outside of the free and combined state, woman, like the domesticated beaver or the Russian peasant, becomes a being so inferior to her destiny and talents that we are inclined to despise her when judging her superficially according to appearances. "It is a surprising thing that women should have always shown themselves superior to men when they have had it in their power to display on the throne their natural talents, of which the diadem assured them a free use. Is it not certain that of eight queens, independent and unmarried, seven will be found to have reigned with glory, while of eight kings, we count habitually seven feeble sovereigns.