Among the problems that were then exercising the little Court of Love was the equality of men and women in marriage, and their respective rights in love. There had been young men, honest, protestant, and rather ridiculous,--Scandinavians and Swiss--who had based equality on virtue: saying that men should come to marriage as chaste as women. The Parisian casuists looked for another sort of equality, an equality based on loss of virtue, saying that women should come to marriage as besmirched as men,--the right to take lovers. The Parisians had carried adultery, in imagination and practice, to such a pitch that they were beginning to find it rather insipid: and in the world of letters attempts were being made to support it by a new invention: the prostitution of young girls,--I mean regularized, universal, virtuous, decent, domestic, and, above all, social prostitution.--There had just appeared a book on the question, full of talent, which apparently said all there was to be said: through four hundred pages of playful pedantry, "strictly in accordance with the rules of the Baconian method," it dealt with the "best method of controlling the relations of the sexes." It was a lecture on free love, full of talk about manners, propriety, good taste, nobility, beauty, truth, modesty, morality,--a regular Berquin for young girls who wanted to go wrong.--It was, for the moment, the Gospel in which Colette's little court rejoiced, while they paraphrased it. It goes without saying, that, like all disciples, they discarded all the justice, observation, and even humanity that lay behind the paradox, and only retained the evil in it. They plucked all the most poisonous flowers from the little bed of sweetened blossoms,--aphorisms of this sort: "The taste for pleasure can only sharpen the taste for work":--"It is monstrous that a girl should become a mother before she has tasted the sweets of life."--"To have had the love of a worthy and pure-souled man as a girl is the natural preparation of a woman for a wise and considered motherhood":--"Mothers," said this author, "should organize the lives of their daughters with the same delicacy and decency with which they control the liberty of their sons."--"The time would come when girls would return as naturally from their lovers as now they return from a walk or from taking tea with a friend." Colette laughingly declared that such teaching was very reasonable. Christophe had a horror of it. He exaggerated its importance and the evil that it might do. The French are too clever to bring their literature into practice. These Diderots in miniature are, in ordinary life, like the genial Panurge of the encyclopedia, honest citizens, not really a whit less timorous than the rest. It is precisely because they are so timid in action that they amuse themselves with carrying action (in thought) to the limit of possibility. It is a game without any risk. But Christophe was not a French dilettante.