La Bruyère says: 'Women for the most part have no principles, as men understand the word. They are guided by their feelings, and have full faith in their guide. Their notions of propriety and impropriety, right and wrong, they get from the little world embraced by their affections.' Alphonse Karr says: 'Never attempt to prove anything to a woman: she believes only according to her feelings. Endeavour, then, to please and persuade: she may yield to the person who reasons with her, not to his arguments. She will listen to the strongest, the most unanswerable proofs, enough to silence an assembly of learned theologians; and when you have done she will reply, with the utmost unconcern, and in perfect good faith: "Well, and what has all that to do with the matter?"' It is probable that both these last philosophers were 'very much married.' No one, however, that is capable of anything beyond a superficial judgment has ever imagined that the French have a genuine respect for women. Their sayings about them are very severe. 'Whenever two women form a friendship, it is merely a coalition against a third,' writes Karr; and even Rochefoucauld confesses, 'Most women care little about friendship; they find it insipid as soon as they have known what it is to love.' 'No woman is pleased,' asserts Octave Feuillet, 'at being told by a man that he loves her like a sister.' At the same time, our Parisian philosophers give every credit to female attractions. 'Do not flatter yourself,' says one, 'because you have studied, and possibly understand all that is to be understood of womankind, you are safe against their wiles. A word, a look, from one of them may make you forget in a twinkling of an eye all your boasted knowledge.' It is like escaping into the fresh air from some brilliant but unhealthy scene to read, after these cynical assertions, what an American essayist (who ought to have been an Englishman) has to say upon this same subject: 'A woman who does not carry about with her a halo of good feeling wherever she goes, an atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of at least six feet radius, which wraps every human being upon whom she is pleased to bestow her presence, and gives him the comfortable belief that she is rather glad than otherwise that he is alive, may do well enough to hold discussions with, but is not worth talking to--as a woman.' This is almost as great a general compliment as Steele's well-known eulogy on Lady Elizabeth Hastings was a particular one: 'To behold her is an immediate check on loose behaviour, and to love her is a liberal education.'