Charmingly serious himself, Feuillet’s heroines likewise are always serious, in their different charming ways. They may be wilful and capricious, like Marguerite Laroque, or fond of the excitements of the world, like Mme. de Rias, or wise in their generation, like Mme. de la Veyle, but they are always womanly and human at the red-ripe of the heart, and they are almost always religious. A sceptic, scepticlike, Feuillet utterly discountenances scepticism in woman. Even his most recusant of masculine unbelievers, the Vicomte de Vaudricourt, proclaims his preference for a pious wife. "Not, of course," he says, "that I exaggerate the moral guarantees offered by piety, or that I mistake it for a synonym of virtue. But still it is certain that with women the idea of duty is rarely dissociated from religious ideas. Because religion doesn’t keep all of them straight, it is an error to conclude that it keeps none of them straight; and it’s always well to be on the safe side." Elsewhere Feuillet gives us his notion of the moral outlook of the woman who is not religious. Evil for her, he tells us, ceases to be evil, and becomes simply _inconvenance_. ’Tis a very mannish, a very Frenchmannish, way of viewing the thing. One has sometimes heard it maintained that only women can reveal themselves with perfect grace in a form so intimate as letters or a diary; that a man’s hand is apt to be too heavy, his manner too self-conscious. Perhaps it is Feuillet’s sympathy with women that has made him the dab he is at this womanly art. In _La Morte_, for instance, we learn vastly more of Bernard’s character from his diary than we should from thrice the number of pages of third-personal exposition. The letters from Marie to her mother, in _Monsieur de Camors_, furnish the single element of relief in that lugubrious composition. Even those that pass between Rias and Mme. de Lorris, in _Un Mariage dans le Monde_—though their subject-matter is sufficiently depressing, though the man is an egotistical cad, and the great lady who is giving him her help and pity ought rather to despise and spurn him—are exceedingly good and natural letters; and the letter from Mme. de Rias to Kévern, which ends the book, is a very jewel of a letter. But it is in the diary of his poor young man that Feuillet’s command of the first person singular attains its most completely satisfying results.