to provide themselves with the obstacles which have saved you; in that, where men have attacked their virtue with more audacity, more facility, more frequency, and more impunity, and consequently with more advantages of every sort; in that, where the impressions of education, of example, of pride, the desire of a satisfactory establishment could not sustain them.  Two doors below, there is a woman whom you hate and despise.  And in spite of the outside aid which sustains that virtue, of which you are so proud, in two days you might be more despicable than she, because you will have had greater helps to guarantee you against misfortune.  I am not seeking to deprive you of the merit of your virtue, nor am I endeavoring to prevent you from attaching too much importance to it; by convincing you of its fragility, I wish to obtain from you only a trifle of indulgence for those whom a too impetuous inclination, or the misfortunes of circumstances have precipitated into a position so humiliating in their own eyes; my sole object is to make you understand that you ought to glorify yourself less in the possession of an advantage which you do not owe to yourself, and of which you may be deprived to-morrow.”

She was going to continue, but some one interrupted us.  Soon afterward, I learned by my own experience that I should not have had so good an opinion of many virtues which had been formerly imposed upon me, beginning with my own.

XXVI

Love Demands Freedom of Action

I have been of the same opinion as you, Marquis, although the ideas I communicated to you yesterday appeared to be true speculatively, that it would be dangerous if all women were to be guided by them.  It is not by a knowledge of their frailty, that women will remain virtuous, but by the conviction that they are free and mistresses of themselves when it comes to yield or to resist.  Is it by persuading a soldier that he will be vanquished that he is goaded into fighting with courage?  Did you not notice that the woman who did the talking as I have related in my last letter, had a personal interest in maintaining her system?  It is true, that when we examine her reasoning according to the rules of philosophy, it does seem to be a trifle specious, but it is to be feared that in permitting ourselves to reason in that fashion on what virtue is, we may succeed in converting into a problem, the rules we should receive and observe as a law, which it is a crime to construe.  Moreover, to persuade women that it is not to themselves they are indebted for the virtue they possess, might it mot deprive them of the most powerful motive to induce them to preserve it?  I mean by that, the persuasion that it is their own work they defend.  The consequences of such morality would be discouraging, and tend to diminish, in the eyes of a guilty woman, the importance of her errors.  But let us turn to matters of more interest to you.