I opened the Essays carelessly, for each and every page of them is precious and replete with themes for meditation.  In so doing, I alighted upon the chapter entitled, ’Of three Good Women,’—­which commences thus:  ’They are not to be found by the dozen, as every one knows, and especially not in the duties of married life, for that is a market full of such thorny circumstances that it is no easy matter for a woman’s will to keep whole and sound in it for any length of time.’

‘Montaigne is an impertinent fellow!’ I exclaimed, slamming to the book.  ’What? this close reader of antiquity, this fine analyst of the human heart, has been able to find only three good women, only three devoted wives, in all the Greek and Roman annals!  This is playing the joker out of season.  Goodness is the special attribute of woman.  Every married woman is good, or supposed to be such.  I bethink me, too, that our old jurists always make the law presume this goodness to exist, at the outset,’

Thus meditating, I wandered into my library, and there took up a fine old volume, bound in red morocco, and entitled ‘The Dream of Vergier;’ a book full of wisdom and logic, and written by some venerable clerk, during the reign of Charles V., king of France.  I looked for the page that had struck my fancy, but—­alas! how oddly one’s memory changes with the lapse of years—­instead of finding, in that grave old book, the just panegyric of woman’s goodness, I discovered, to my great surprise, only a violent satire all spiced with texts borrowed from St. Augustine, the Roman laws and the ancient canons, with this sage conclusion, full worthy of the exordium:—­

’I do not say, however, that there is no good woman at all, but the species is rare; and hence an old law says that no law concerning good women should be made, for that laws are to be made concerning things of usual occurrence, as it is written in Auth. sinc prohib., etc., quia vero and L. Nam ad ca, Dig. De Leffibus.’

These juridical epigrams, these cool pleasantries, in a serious book, shocked me more than even the hard hits of the Gascon philosopher.  ’Good women,’ I thought to myself, ’are found everywhere.  In history?  No; history is written by men who love and admire heroes only, that is to say, those who rob, subjugate, or slay them.  In theology?  No; it has not yet forgiven the daughters of Eve the fault which ruined us,—­a sin of which they have retained at least a little share.  In the records of the law, then?  No, again; for men make the laws.  Woman is, in their eyes, nothing but a minor, legally incapable of governing herself.  God only knows what is, here, as in all things, the difference between the fact and the law.  Are these good women to be found in plays, romances, or novels?  No, still; for they are but the perpetual recital of feminine artfulness.  Where, then, shall we look for good women?—­In the realm of fable and fiction, in the kingdom of fancy—­the dominion of the ideal.