The moment Adolphe is free he realises that freedom is now useless to him; he no longer knows what to do with it, and longs for the old fetters. Constant himself thus expresses the moral of the book: "The strongest passion cannot survive the struggle with the established order of things. Society is too powerful. It makes that love too bitter which it has not recognised and stamped with the seal of its approval. Woe, then, to the woman who rests her hope of happiness upon a feeling which all things combine to poison, and against which society, when it is not obliged to respect it as legal, enlists all that is basest in the human heart, with the aim of destroying all that is good." [1] The day came when criticism uplifted its voice against this dethronement of youth and beauty. Jules Janin in his light way prefers this complaint in the form of an attack on Balzac:-- "Formerly," he writes, "as far as the novel and the drama were concerned, the woman of thirty to forty was regarded as past all possibilities in the way of passion, but now, thanks to the discovery of this new wide and smiling domain, she reigns supreme in both drama and novel. A new world has superseded the old, the woman of forty has suppressed the girl of sixteen. "'Who knocks?' shouts drama in its deep voice. 'Who is there?' cries the novel in gentler tones. 'It is I,' answers tremblingly the girl of sixteen, with the pearly teeth, the snowy bosom, the soft outlines, the bright smile, and the gentle glance. 'It is I! I am the same age as Racine's Julie, Shakespeare's Desdemona, Molière's Agnès, Voltaire's Zaire, Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut, Saint-Pierre's Virginie. It is I! I am the same charming, volatile, delightful age as the young girls in Ariosto, Lesage, Byron, and Sir Walter Scott. It is I! I am innocent youth, with its hopes, with its divinely beautiful, fearless attitude towards the future. I am the age of chaste desires, of noble instincts, of pride, and of innocence. Make room for me, dear sirs!' Thus speaks the charming girl of sixteen to the novelists and the dramatists. But the novelists and the dramatists at once reply: 'We are busy with your mother, child; come again twenty years hence, and we shall see if we can make something out of you.' "In the novel and the drama of to-day, we have no one but the woman of thirty, who will be forty to-morrow. She alone can love, she alone can suffer. She is so much more dramatic, because she cannot afford to wait. What can we make out of a little girl who can do nothing but weep, love, sigh, smile, hope, tremble? The woman of thirty does not weep, she sobs; she does not sigh, she utters anguished cries; she does not love, she is consumed with passion; she does not smile, she shrieks; she does not dream, she acts! This is drama, this is romance, this is life. Thus speak, act, and reply our great playwrights and our famous writers of fiction."