Molière was very immoral in his day, and this was the secret of his success with a public which had no other choice, on its days of repentance, than among the most eloquent or the most skilful preachers. It is as he has been less understood, that Molière has become, little by little, a moralist. As successive sensibilities have distinguished themselves more sharply from the sensibility of the seventeenth century, the coarseness has lost its rank odour and we have come at last to find delicate certain sallies which, brought up to date, would embarrass us. Molière, much more brutal at bottom than on the surface, enjoys what might be called an acquired morality. It is an inevitable phenomenon of adjustment. It was necessary either to sacrifice Molière or to demonstrate the beauty of his philosophic genius. His saying, which is only a saying, "For the love of humanity," has been hollowed and dug out by the commentators like an ivory ball which, at last, in the lathe, becomes a system of concentric spheres. It is merely a child's rattle. How are the _Femmes Savantes_ and Feminism to be reconciled? This will be a very curious teat to follow. In her _Réflexions sur les Femmes_, so penetrating and so well written, Madame de Lambert says that this comedy, odious in itself, made education for young women seem improper, immodest, almost obscene; whence the craze for purely sensual pleasure to which women inclined, since they had no other resources than love and good living. The difficulty will be solved by considering separately the idea of feminism and the idea of the _Femmes Savantes_, and by cavilling at the word "savant," which has recently come to have a very definite significance. The _savant_, in the seventeenth century, was the amateur, not only of the sciences, but of letters--the man eager for all novelties, who discussed vortices without neglecting Vaugelas. Madame de Sévigné was a "femme savante," also Ninon. No doubt it was necessary to save Molière's work. It was worth it. But might not it have been done more honestly, and with greater lucidity?