What great things might be accomplished by their influence if only we could bring it to bear!  Alas for the age whose women lose their ascendancy, and fail to make men respect their judgment!  This is the last stage of degradation.  Every virtuous nation has shown respect to women.  Consider Sparta, Germany, and Rome; Rome the throne of glory and virtue, if ever they were enthroned on earth.  The Roman women awarded honour to the deeds of great generals, they mourned in public for the fathers of the country, their awards and their tears were alike held sacred as the most solemn utterance of the Republic.  Every great revolution began with the women.  Through a woman Rome gained her liberty, through a woman the plebeians won the consulate, through a woman the tyranny of the decemvirs was overthrown; it was the women who saved Rome when besieged by Coriolanus.  What would you have said at the sight of this procession, you Frenchmen who pride yourselves on your gallantry, would you not have followed it with shouts of laughter?  You and I see things with such different eyes, and perhaps we are both right.  Such a procession formed of the fairest beauties of France would be an indecent spectacle; but let it consist of Roman ladies, you will all gaze with the eyes of the Volscians and feel with the heart of Coriolanus.

I will go further and maintain that virtue is no less favourable to love than to other rights of nature, and that it adds as much to the power of the beloved as to that of the wife or mother.  There is no real love without enthusiasm, and no enthusiasm without an object of perfection real or supposed, but always present in the imagination.  What is there to kindle the hearts of lovers for whom this perfection is nothing, for whom the loved one is merely the means to sensual pleasure?  Nay, not thus is the heart kindled, not thus does it abandon itself to those sublime transports which form the rapture of lovers and the charm of love.  Love is an illusion, I grant you, but its reality consists in the feelings it awakes, in the love of true beauty which it inspires.  That beauty is not to be found in the object of our affections, it is the creation of our illusions.  What matter! do we not still sacrifice all those baser feelings to the imaginary model? and we still feed our hearts on the virtues we attribute to the beloved, we still withdraw ourselves from the baseness of human nature.  What lover is there who would not give his life for his mistress?  What gross and sensual passion is there in a man who is willing to die?  We scoff at the knights of old; they knew the meaning of love; we know nothing but debauchery.  When the teachings of romance began to seem ridiculous, it was not so much the work of reason as of immorality.