This is the phenomenon which Maupassant, with the unfeigned astonishment of a full-blooded man, has described in _Notre Cœur_. His is the _fin de siècle_ woman whose whole being has become unproductive, her intellect, her grace, her gentle nature, and even her powers of affection. Man is no longer there for her soul and her senses! She is self-sufficient. There is no need to describe woman such as she became during the last half of the present century--how she developed in the struggle to compete with man, and how she was influenced from the point of view of personal independence--how she became free and became her own master, and won for herself a place in the history of her time--how she escaped from her subjection to man, yet could not forego him altogether--that is a subject on which there are a mass of confessions written by some of the most celebrated women of our time, by means of which many women are led to a better comprehension of themselves, and many men are able to find the solution to the riddle of woman which has been to them the cause of much suffering. A portion of these confessions have been collected by me in my book called _Modern Women_. _Gottfried Keller and Women_ I There are some labours to which we sit down with a sigh, conscious of having undertaken more than we are able to accomplish, while at the same time the thought of it attracts us and we do not like to give it up. I have never yet read anything about Gottfried Keller which seemed fully to grasp the real nature of the man with the secret of his separateness, and to place him before us with a certainty of comprehension such as cannot be gainsaid. He is something so complete in himself, so apart from others, that like all good things there is no getting round him. For the essence of good things consists in being so sound that there is no use in coaxing or persuading them, or in trying to discover a fault in them; and for that very reason these old jesters studied the noble art of rendering themselves inaccessible. As an author he wrote only when he felt inclined, and when he was not in the mood he waited--whether for months or years it was all the same to him. As a man he was so reserved that hardly a single one of his personal experiences found their way to publicity, and after his death it might have been supposed that he had never had any, if Jacob Bächtold had not published a collection of his letters under the title of _Gottfried Keller’s Life_, in which he speaks to us as one more alive than the living who are still among us. In reading his books we notice that the purer incidents are mingled with others of a more confidential nature, and it dawns upon us that he understood how to choose his incidents, so that afterwards they should not tell tales. This fact proves, in the first place, that he had nothing to do with those whom Nietzsche would call “literary women,” this being a silent memorial to his good taste and noble character.