It is their element, their centre, their world.  They attach themselves to the old nave as sailors attach themselves to their ship.

They know all the little corners and recesses of the temple.  They have knelt at all the chapels and burnt tapers before all the saints.  But there is always one place which they have an affection for, and where they are invariably to be found.  Why?  Mystery!  What do they do there?  Mystery again.  They remain there for whole hours, motionless, dreaming, their eyes fixed on vacancy, their thoughts one knows not where, and in their hands a book of prayers which they open from time to time as if to recall themselves to reality.

A young priest passes by.  He recognizes them.  He bows and smiles to them like old acquaintances.  In fact, he sees them there every day at the same place.  Godly sheep!  They look at him passing by, and, while pretending to read their psalms, they follow him with that deep, undefinable, mysterious look, which inspires fear.

What connection is there between their prayers and reveries, and the lively behaviour of this red-faced Abbe?

How he must laugh, and how he must inwardly despise these women, who can find no better employment for the day than to mutter Paternosters, devoid of meaning, before an image of wood or stone, or to remain in the vague sanctimonious contemplation of a mysterious unknown.

Poor women! who, better led, better instructed in their duties and mission in life, would have become excellent mothers, might have been the light and joy of some hearth which now remains deserted, and who, lost and misled by a false education and a detestable system of morality, fall into wasting mysticism, hysterical ecstasies, a contemplative and useless existence, into degrading practices and shameful superstitions, and instead of being the fruitful animating springs of moral and social progress, become the passive instruments, the unfruitful things of the priest, that is to say the agents of reaction.

It is they who have caused thinkers to doubt the noble part which woman is called to fulfil; who have compelled Proudhon to say:  “Woman is the desolation of the just,” and that other apostle of socialism, Bebel, that she is incapable of helping in the reconstitution of Society: 

“Slave of every prejudice, affected by every moral and physical malady, she will be the stumbling-block of progress.  With her must be used, morally certainly, perhaps physically, the peremptory reason to the slaves of the old race:  The Stick!” We are far from the divine book of Michelet, Love.

No, do not let us beat woman, even with a rose, as the Arab proverb says.  She is a sick child, foolishly spoiled, who requires only to be cured and reformed by another education.  The Comtesse was not like this.  Skilful and intelligent, she knew what talking meant, and how to read in wise men’s eyes and between the lines of letters.  Therefore, she had learnt in good time, how to bring together two things which the profane suppose to be so opposed to one another, and which form the secret of the Temple:  Religion and pleasure.