_Very exceptionally, yes_; but in the indolent classes, in which transgressions in diet, the lack of an intelligent physical education, and a thousand causes which I need not point out here, render women valetudinarians. _Generally, no._ All our vigorous peasant women, our robust laundresses, who stand the whole time with their feet in water, our workwomen, our tradeswomen, our teachers, our servant-maids, who attend with alacrity to their business and pleasures, experience no uncomfortableness, or at most, very little. Michelet, therefore, has not only erred in erecting a physiological law into a morbid condition, but he has also sinned against rational method by making general rules of a few exceptions, and by proceeding from this generalization, contradicted by the great majority of facts, to construct a system of subjection. If it is of the faculty of abstracting and generalizing that Michelet, as he employs it, robs woman, we can only congratulate her on the deprivation. Not only is woman diseased, says Michelet, in consequence of a biological law, but she is always diseased; she has uterine affections, hereditary tendencies, which may assume a terrible form in her sex, etc. We would ask Michelet whether he considers his own sex as always diseased because it is corroded by cancer, disfigured by eruptions, tortured as much as ours by hereditary tendencies; for hereditary tendencies torture it as much as ours, and it is decimated and enfeebled far more fearfully by shameful diseases, the fruits of its excesses. Of what, then, is Michelet thinking, in laying such stress on the diseases of women in the face of the quite as numerous diseases of men? The wife should never be divorced or re-marry, because she has become the property of the husband. This is proved by the fact that the children of the lover or of the second husband resemble the first husband. If this is true, there are no children that resemble their mother. There are no children that resemble the progenitors or collateral relatives of their parents. _Every child_ resembles the first that knew his mother. Can you explain, then, why it is that so often he does _not_ resemble him? Why he resembles a grandfather, an uncle, an aunt, a brother, a sister of one of the parents? Why, in certain cities in the south of France, the inhabitants have preserved the Greek type, ascribed to the women, instead of that of their barbaric fathers? Why negresses who conceive from a white, bring into the world a mulatto, oftenest with thick lips, a flat nose, and woolly hair? Why many children resemble portraits which had attracted the attention of the mother? Why, in fine, physiologists, impressed by numerous facts, have thought themselves justified in declaring woman _the preserver of the type_? In the face of these undeniable facts, I ask you, yourself, what becomes of your theory? It returns to the domain of chimeras.