If the world were to reject all the great men who have erred, would not the pantheons of the nations be well-nigh empty? If it were to reject the works of every writer whose life was not absolutely immaculate, what literature would be left? Masterpieces of the human mind, writings that have wrought an infinity of good, would be cast aside. One may remind the reader that a good many English authors even of that age of specious respectability, the Victorian era, were by no means perfect in their private lives. In France, no doubt, more laxity has prevailed. Take that champion of Christianity, Chateaubriand, and remember the many _liaisons_ of his married life; take that great deist, Victor Hugo, also a married man, and with no such excuse as Chateaubriand and Zola may have had, and remember his long connection with Madame Juliette Drouet. And as examples of moral laxity among men outside the matrimonial pale, take Alfred de Musset and both the Dumas, particularly the elder. Old Parisians, like the writer, will remember the day in or about 1869 when even the boulevards were scandalised by the sight which confronted one and all in the windows of every shop where photographs were sold. There was the portrait of the prince of romancers with Adah Isaacs Menken, the circus-rider, seated, in her fleshings, on his knees, her arms cast lovingly about his neck. Happily in the afternoon the son appeared upon the scene and carried off all such photographs that he could find, and thereupon Paris, which had been laughing a pornographic laugh, applauded him, recalling the story of Japhet and his father Noah. But it is not only men who have thrust the moral law aside. The lives of George Eliot and others are known to us. They were as nothing beside that of George Sand, who in the matter of her private life was perhaps the nearest approach to Byron to be found among female writers. She passed from Baron Dudevant, her husband, to Jules Sandeau, then to Mérimée, then to Musset, then to Pagello, then to Michel de Bourges, then to Pierre Leroux, then to Chopin, and at last to Manceau, the engraver, those passions being interspersed with platonic interludes with Lamennais and Liszt. Yet Emerson, "one of the purest of men, dwelt on the rare and beautiful sentiment that runs through George Sand's 'Consuelo.' And who can deny the evidence of keen political insight, lofty ideas, and pure morality in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, and George Eliot?"[7] People still read "Consuelo," even as they read "Les Trois Mousquetaires." They also read "Les Contemplations" and even dip into "Le Génie du Christianisme." They ostracise none of the great writers because there was error in their lives. Besides, it must be acknowledged as true that a counsel of perfection, or what we regard as perfection from our social standpoint, may well come from the imperfect. In fact it could not be otherwise, since we are all imperfect in one or another way.