In the evening by candle-light, ensconced in some nook of the spacious fire-place, young men and girls would sit unceremoniously on one another’s knees, laughing and talking nonsense. People who have got past these maidenly frolics themselves find it more and more difficult to become reconciled to them. Jean Bouchet feelingly describes them in his book, _Les Regnars traversant les voies périlleuses_, at a period when the art was still in its infancy. Young men easily get absolution: they naturally profit by opportunities of amusing themselves; and, besides, theirs is the passive part. But the girls! how venturesome they are, how light-heartedly they chip, at least in spirit, the poor remnant of their semi-virginity! It would be a mistake to suppose that flirtation will in time lead to the introduction of the love element into marriage. These damsels are by no means anxious to allow the principle of earthly love—that is to say, a germ of divorce—to steal into their married life. Their ideal consists in falling in love with a man of wealth and established position, and so far it has a reassuring character, worthy of respect. At this stage of their life they are working for themselves, as later they will have to work for humanity. M. Bourget has discovered in America the different varieties of the sixteenth-century flirt: the professional beauty; the girl of ideas, who stumps a platform and stands for the parish council; the “jolly good fellow”; the girl of well-balanced philosophical mind; the coquette; the girl of ambitions; all are ambitious and to some extent coquettish, and even the philosophical girl gives the ideal only a secondary place. But amid this charming round of coquetting and artless sensibility, passion sometimes flashes out—passion, at once the great peril of the Latin races and their eternal charm. One may be convinced that the heart has been subdued by cold calculation, and that love is laid under a spell by means of philosophy; but they burst their bonds! And here the parts are not distributed as one would wish: this generation is about to inflict a wound on platonism! Often it is the wife who, instead of serving as an idol, gives herself to love. In the terrible veins of French and Spanish women there flows a blood which they do not always succeed in mastering, the old blood of knights or peasants; they bruise themselves against the invisible mail-armour of modern life.