A superior woman obliges her husband to depend upon her. He is forced to submit to the control of an intelligent spirit, and does not feel free to follow his own caprices. This is why vicious husbands need ignorant wives. Molière struck a blow as severe at frivolity, in the _Précieuses Ridicules_, [Footnote 5] as at pedantry in the _Femmes Savantes_. The eighteenth century retained merely a prejudice convenient to itself, which the regency established as a law, and finally licentious men surrendered the honor of their familie rather than find in a wife an inconvenient judge, a living conscience, an ever-present reproach. They preferred to have wives as vain and frivolous as themselves, and to make of marriage a contract in which fortunes and titles only were considered, and where affection on either side went for nothing. The world saw with affright the corruption that speedily engulfed French society. [Footnote 5: It is also to be observed that Molière's learned women had only the affectation and not the reality of science, just as the _précieuses_ merely affected the fine language and manners of the court. The former were ignorant women playing the part of _savantes_ the latter provincial women aping Paris fashions.] Why did not M. de Maistre, who saw the remains of this corruption and the chastisements it had merited, understand that the degraded position assigned to women was one of its causes, and that prejudice against the intellectual elevation of women was the work of vice? V. The Dangers of Repression. The very nature of things speaks plainly enough. Human nature in all its faculties demands instruction, enlargement, enlightenment, elevation. {35} From my own observation I must assert that nothing is more dangerous than smothered faculties, unanswered cravings, unsatisfied hunger and thirst. Thence comes the perversion of passions, created for noble ends, but turned against truth and virtue. Thence issue those distorted, crooked, and perverse ways into which we are drawn by an ignorance incapable of choice, judgment, or self-restraint: _conversi dirumpent vos_, says the sacred writer. There lies the secret of many falls, many scandals, or, at least, of much wretched levity among women! If these rich and ardent powers had been cultivated, we need not now deplore their ruin; we should not have to sigh over the pitifully incorrect intellectual standard, the mental weakness of so many women of distinguished nature, called to be ornaments to the world and to do honor to their families, but of whom education, checked in its development, has made elegant women perhaps, at thirty years of age, but frivolous, commonplace and useless. Surely no one can seriously contradict me in these assertions. Again, and this is a very important consideration: