[73] _Medical Women_, p. 63, et seq., by Sophia Jex-Blake, Edinburgh, 1886, and _Pioneer Work in Opening the Medical Profession to Women_, Chap. III, by Elizabeth Blackwell, London, 1895. [74] Mme. Dacier was a remarkable exception chiefly because she was the daughter and pupil of one Hellenist before becoming the wife of another. [75] _Lettres et Entretiens sur l'Education de Filles_, Tom. I, pp. 225-231. Compare this superficial course of study at Saint-Cyr with the elaborate course mapped out by Lionardo d'Arezzo in a letter addressed to the illustrious lady, Baptista Malatesta. In the broad programme of education for women recommended by this eminent man of letters, "poet, orator, historian, and the rest, all must be studied, each must contribute a share. Our learning thus becomes full, ready, varied, elegant, available for action or for discourse on all subjects." Lionardo's curriculum of studies for women was quite as comprehensive as that required for men, "with perhaps a little less stress upon rhetoric and more upon religion. There was no assumption that a lower standard of attainment is inevitably a consequence of smaller capacity." Nor was this thorough study of letters by the women of Italy "unfavorably regarded by social opinion"; neither did it introduce "a new standard of womanly activity. Women, indeed, at this epoch, seem to have preserved their moral and intellectual balance under the stress of the new enthusiasm better than men. The learned ladies were, in actual life, good wives and mothers, domestic and virtuous women of strong judgment and not seldom of marked capacity in affairs." Cf. _Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators_, pp. 122, 132, 197, by W. H. Woodward, Cambridge, 1905. [76] Thus, in a letter of hers to Mme. de Lauzun occurs a sentence like the following: "Il lia sy lontant que je n'ay antandu parler de vous." The duchess of Monpensier, daughter of Gaston d'Orleans, in a letter to her father exhibits a similar ignorance of her own language, when she writes: "J'ai cru que Votre Altesse seret bien ese de savoir sete istoire." Quoted by Rousselot in his _Histoire de l'Education des Femmes en France_, Tom. I, p. 287. [77] _Les Femmes Savantes_, Act II, Scene 7. [78] Destouches, in his _L'Homme singulier_, makes one of his female characters, who loves study, speak in the following pathetic fashion: