Indeed, the ladies who in his pages have broken loose from all social restraints, differ only in external circumstances from their more correct sisters. Coralie, in the 'Illusions Perdues,' is not so chaste in her conduct as the immaculate Henriette, but is not a whit less delicate in her tastes. Madame de la Baudraye deserts her husband, and lives for some years with her disreputable lover at Paris, and does not in the least forfeit the sympathies of her creator. Balzac's feminine types may be classified pretty easily. At bottom they are all of the sultana variety--playthings who occasionally venture into mixing with the serious affairs of life, but then only on pain of being ridiculous (as in the 'Employes,' or the 'Muse du Departement'); but properly confined to their drawing-rooms, with delicate cajoleries for their policy, and cunning instead of intellect. Sometimes they are cold-hearted and selfish, and then they are vicious, making victims of lovers, husbands, or fathers, consuming fortunes, and spreading ill-will by cunning intrigues; sometimes they are virtuous, and therefore according to Balzac's logic, pitiable victims of the world. But their virtue, when it exists, is the effect, not of lofty principle, but of a certain delicacy of taste corresponding to a fine organisation. They object to vice, because it is apt to be coarse; and are perfectly ready to yield, if it can be presented in such graceful forms as not to shock their sensibilities. Marriage is therefore a complicated intrigue in which one party is always deceived, though it may be for his or her good. If you will be loved, says the judicious lady in the 'Memoires de Deux Jeunes Mariees,' the secret is not to love; and the rather flimsy epigram is converted into a great moral truth. The justification of the lady is, that love is only made permanent by elaborate intrigue. The wife is to be always on the footing of a mistress who can only preserve her lover by incessant and infinitely varied caresses. To do this, she must be herself cool. The great enemy of matrimonial happiness is satiety, and we are constantly presented with an affectionate wife boring her husband to death, and alienating him by over-devotion. If one party is to be cheated, the one who is freest from passion will be the winner of the game. As a maxim, after the fashion of Rochefoucauld, this doctrine may have enough truth to be plausible; but when seriously accepted and made the substantive moral of a succession of stories, one is reminded less of a really acute observer than of a lad fresh from college who thinks that wisdom consists in an exaggerated cynicism. When ladies of this variety break their hearts, they either die or retire in a picturesque manner to a convent. They are indeed the raw material of which the genuine _devote_ is made. The morbid sentimentality directed to the lover passes without perceptible shock into a religious sentimentality, the object of which is at least ostensibly different.