Various reasons have been alleged for this:  Education, example, simplicity of life.  Professor Haddock asserts that this virtue of provincial ladies is solely due to the fact that the heels of their shoes are low.  “A woman,” said he, in a learned article in the “Anthropological Review”, “a woman attracts a civilized man in proportion as her feet make an angle with the ground.  If this angle is as much as thirty-five degrees, the attraction becomes acute.  For the position of the feet upon the ground determines the whole carriage of the body, and it results that provincial women, since they wear low heels, are not very attractive, and preserve their virtue with ease.”  These conclusions were not generally accepted.  It was objected that under the influence of English and American fashions, low heels had been introduced generally without producing the results attributed to them by the learned Professor; moreover, it was said that the difference he pretended to establish between the morals of the metropolis and those of the provinces is perhaps illusory, and that if it exists, it is apparently due to the fact that great cities offer more advantages and facilities for love than small towns provide.  However that may be, the provinces began to murmur against the Prime Minister, and to raise a scandal.  This was not yet a danger, but there was a possibility that it might become one.

For the moment the peril was nowhere and yet everywhere.  The majority remained solid; but the leaders became stiff and exacting.  Perhaps Hippolyte Ceres would never have intentionally sacrificed his interests to his vengeance.  But thinking that he could henceforth, without compromising his own fortune, secretly damage that of Paul Visire, he devoted himself to the skilful and careful preparation of difficulties and perils for the Head of the Government.  Though far from equalling his rival in talent, knowledge, and authority, he greatly surpassed him in his skill as a lobbyist.  The most acute parliamentarians attributed the recent misfortunes of the majority to his refusal to vote.  At committees, by a calculated imprudence, he favoured motions which he knew the Prime Minister could not accept.  One day his intentional awkwardness provoked a sudden and violent conflict between the Minister of the Interior, and his departmental Treasurer.  Then Ceres became frightened and went no further.  It would have been dangerous for him to overthrow the ministry too soon.  His ingenious hatred found an issue by circuitous paths.  Paul Visire had a poor cousin of easy morals who bore his name.  Ceres, remembering this lady, Celine Visire, brought her into prominence, arranged that she should become intimate with several foreigners, and procured her engagements in the music-halls.  One summer night, on a stage in the Champs Elysees before a tumultuous crowd, she performed risky dances to the sounds of wild music which was audible in the gardens where the President of the Republic was entertaining Royalty.  The name of Visire, associated with these scandals, covered the walls of the town, filled the newspapers, was repeated in the cafes and at balls, and blazed forth in letters of fire upon the boulevards.