The women who ask to be free, great, mistaken poet, are those who are conscious of their dignity, of the true rôle of their sex in humanity; those who desire that the women who follow them in the career of labor should no longer be obliged _to live by man_, because to live by him is at least to prostitute their dignity, and almost always, their whole person. They wish that woman should be the equal of man, in order to love him holily, to devote herself without calculation, to cease to deceive him or to rule him by artifice, and to become to him a useful auxiliary, instead of a servant or a toy. They know our influence over you; slaves, we can only debase you; at present, we render you cowardly, selfish, and dishonest; we send you out every morning, like vultures, upon society, to provide for our foolish expenses or to endow our children; we, women of emancipation, are unwilling that our sex should longer play this odious rôle, and be, through its slavery, an instrument of demoralization and of social degradation,--and this you impute to us as a crime! Ah! I do not believe it; you yourself will say that I ought not to believe it. Looking from a deplorably narrow stand point, you fancied that you saw all woman-kind in a few valetudinarians, your kind heart was moved for them, and you sought to protect them. Had you looked far and high, you would have seen the workers of thought and muscle; you would have comprehended that inequality is to them a source of corruption and suffering. Then, in your lofty and glowing style, you would have written, not this book of Love which repels all intelligent and reflective women, but a great and beautiful work to demand the right of half the human race. The misfortune, the irreparable misfortune, is that instead of climbing to the mountain top to look at every moving thing under the vast horizon, you have shut yourself up in a narrow valley, where, seeing nothing but pale violets, you have concluded that every flower must be also a pale violet; whilst Nature has created a thousand other species, on the contrary, strong and vigorous, with a right, like you, to earth, air, water and sunshine. Whatever may be your love, your kindness and your good intentions towards woman, your book would be immensely dangerous to the cause of her liberty, if men were in a mood to relish your ethics: but they will remain as they are; and the dignity of woman, kept waking by their brutality, their despotism, their desertion, their foul morals, will not be lulled to sleep under the fresh, verdant, alluring and treacherously perfumed foliage of this manchineel tree, called the book of _Love_. In Michelet's later work, "Woman," by the side of many beautiful pages full of heart and poetry are found things that we regret to point out, for the sake of the author.