[Illustration: "_You_ frank! _You_ simple! Have confidence in _you_! YOU! Why, you would blow your nose with your left hand for nothing but the pleasure of deceiving your right, if you could!"--GAVARNI, _Fourberies de Femmes, Paris, 1846_.] Observe this picture of man's scorn of woman, drawn by Gavarni, the most noted of French caricaturists. I place it first, because it expresses the feeling toward "the subject sex" which satiric art has oftenest exhibited, and because it was executed by the person who excelled all others in delineating what he called the _fourberies de femmes_. Such, in all time, has been the habitual tone of self-indulgent men toward their victims. Gavarni well represents men in this sorry business of reviling women; for in all the old civilizations men in general have done precisely what Gavarni did recently in Paris--first degraded women, then laughed at them. The reader, perhaps, after witnessing some of the French plays and comic operas with which we have been favored in recent years--such as "Frou-Frou," "The Sphinx," "Alixe," and others--may have turned in wild amazement to some friend familiar with Paris from long residence, and asked, Is there _any_ truth in this picture? Are there _any_ people in France who behave and live as these people on the stage behave and live? Many there can not be; for no community could exist half a generation if the majority lived so. But are there any? The correct answer to this question was probably given the other evening by a person accustomed to Paris life: "Yes, there are some; they are the people who write such stuff as this. As for the _bal masqué_, and things of that kind, it is a mere business, the simple object of which is to beguile and despoil the verdant of every land who go to Paris in quest of pleasure." French plays and novels we know do most ludicrously misrepresent the people of other countries. What, for example, can be less like truth than that solemn donkey of a Scotch duke in M. Octave Feuillet's play of "The Sphinx?" The dukes of Scotland are not so numerous nor so unconspicuous a body of men that they can not be known to a curious inquirer, and it is safe to assert that, whatever their faults may be, there is not among them a creature so unspeakably absurd as the _viveur infernal_ of this play. If the author is so far astray with his Scotch duke, he is perhaps not so very much nearer the truth with his French marquis, a personage equally foreign to his experience.