Poor Brantôme! We think we can solve the question which troubles him. The women of that time were waxing philosophic, they had set their minds towards acquiring a good deal of knowledge and yet remaining alive, instead of minimising themselves, humbling themselves, following behind like a boat in tow. They had become vestals (if we may put it thus) in regard to marriage, and considered that their true mission was to shed abroad the love which welled over from their quivering hearts; for it is always the lack of men that turns women into feminists. In the world they were going to become “goddesses,” and it would be impossible any longer to live without them. Francis I., in a court without women, found himself getting too proud and despotic; his gardens appeared to him “flowerless,” so he summoned and enticed young women to him, and treated them “like goddesses in heaven.” He shewed them their new mission. And yet, what unsuspected depths of loathing rose to the lips of those divine women! I do not know whether the number of women sick of their husbands was larger than at present, but it was large enough. Pride and a high sentiment of duty in the gaze of the world long watched over them, like those grand statues of splendid, almost menacing virtues which the sculptors of former days were fond of setting before a tomb, at either end of the grave. But after they had accomplished, unostentatiously, devotedly, the mission for which men married them, namely, kept the house in order, loyally studied the master’s comfort, poulticed and physicked him, borne him children, replenished the stock (pardon the expression) like good brood-mares, and humbly occupied the foot of the table, there came a time when this primary duty was done, and then they sprang up as though from a sleep, and looking at the sun, enquired of him whither they must fly to find life. They were born to sow flowers behind them. Their children were these flowers, painfully plucked out of their very vitals and flung into the future. It remained yet to pluck from their hearts, with a more vivifying joy, immaterial flowers, flowers of love, flowers of happiness, children of the soul, their real children, for if the woman is a passive being in physical conception, in spiritual conception she plays another part, she becomes the active being. The seed is hers to sow. By this time they were no longer at the “angelic age,” as Alfred de Vigny called it, namely, fifteen years. As a rule, they might confess to thirty, the age when women have “a spice of the devil,” the age at which one ought to know how to deal with soul and heart.