They have taken from their mother foolish vanity, ridiculous prejudices, the art of lying; from their father scepticism and an elastic conscience; perhaps they will preserve their virtue and modesty?  The pernicious contacts of the school soon carry them away.

They still have a blush on their face, a down-cast eye, a timid bearing.  But their affected timidity is the token of their knowledge of good and evil; like Eve, if they have not yet tasted of the forbidden fruit, they burn to taste it, for their thought is sullied, their imagination is vagrant and at the bottom of their soul there is a germ of corruption.

They leave the boarding-school virgins, but chaste, never.

Let us then represent the world as it la, women such as they are, and not such as they ought to be; let us call things by their names, and when there is moral deformity somewhere, let us show that deformity.

When we make wonders of the heroines of a novel, possessing the charms of the three Graces and the virtues of the seven sages of Greece, who when they fall, fall in spite of themselves, impelled by a fatal concurrence of circumstances, but with so much candour and innocence, that we cannot do otherwise than pardon their fall and even fail to comprehend that they have fallen, we are completely amazed when we descend from this imaginary world to enter the world of reality.

The idealization of woman has therefore, besides other faults, that of causing as to take a dislike to our ordinary companions.  How, indeed, after being present at the devotion of Sophonisba, at the suicide of the chaste Lucretia, at the display of the virtues of Mademoiselle Agnes, and at that of the form of Venus at the bath, can we contemplate with ravished eye the wife no less plain than lawful, who is sitting with sullen air at our fire-side, who has no other care than that of her person, no other moral capital than a round enough sum of prejudices and follies, and whose charms, finally, resemble more those of a Hottentot Venus than those of Venus Aphrodite.

The picture of virtues is an excellent thing, but still it is necessary that these virtues should exist.  We must not enunciate an idea simply because it is moral, but because it is true. Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas.

That is why I shall not depict the little person, whom I am going to make better known to you, as a model of virtue.  She is an inquisitive girl, she is vehement, she has been brought up in an atmosphere where depravity is more generally inhaled than holiness.  I should then be badly advised in presenting you with an angel of candour and wisdom.

An angel!  She is at that age indeed, at which foolish men call women angels.

  “Before they are wed, they are angels so gentle,
  But quickly they change to vulgarian scolds,
  She-demons who truly make hell of their homes.”

[Footnote 1:  H. Taine (Notes sur Paris).]