As love counts for little in the tying of the matrimonial knot, and the _dot_ counts for much, French unendowed girls stand a poor chance of ever getting married. This exclusion of an enormous number of the best women from the marriage market explains, to a large extent, the many irregular households to be met with in France. The fact that lovable and high-souled women accept the position of mistresses has largely tended to multiply mock marriages. The refusal on the part of the Church of Rome to permit divorce, and the lovelessness of the regular alliances, tend in the same direction. The sum total of all this is that a majority of Frenchwomen have to choose between an unhappy married life without love, and an immoral one with it. Those who are forced into the former in a great many cases seek consolation in an illicit _liaison_; those who drift into the latter become debauched. While thus the young, respectable, and pure-minded girls are relegated to schools and nunneries and excluded from all association with young men, among these licentious pleasure often takes the place of romantic love. Hence physically and morally unhealthy lives, absence of happiness, craving for excitement, morbid passions, pessimism, contempt for life, depraved tastes, hysteria. Scientific atheism had however only aggravated a state of things created by sacerdotal influence on social habits. But it was only natural that a nation, so biassed in social questions as France, should ascribe the decay of morality and of so many other virtues to the weakening of that influence which for centuries had proclaimed itself, and had been considered by the masses as the only check upon wickedness among great and small alike. Hosts of young men who entered life with noble aspirations to fight for high ideals, soon perceived, when left to shift for themselves, that the society around them irresistibly opposed the realization of their hopes. They found it difficult, almost impossible, to reconcile success with self-esteem, love with morality, and their poetical aspirations with their manner of living. Many, in despair of happiness and success, or in order to forget their crumbled illusions, threw themselves into a feverish quest for excitement, in which health of body and mind were jeopardized. Awakening to the full consciousness of the depth of their fall, they could not fail to see that the social system under which they lived was largely responsible for their miseries. In looking back over their wasted lives they saw nought but shattered hopes. What they had forfeited were a happy and vigorous youth, transports of romance, the love of a pure-minded woman, a strong and active manhood, a chivalrous fight for the good, the pure, the true, and the beautiful, the respect of their fellow-men, an ideal home.