Sophy was in love with Telemachus, and loved him with a passion which nothing could cure.  When her father and mother became aware of her infatuation, they laughed at it and tried to cure her by reasoning with her.  They were mistaken, reason was not altogether on their side; Sophy had her own reason and knew how to use it.  Many a time did she reduce them to silence by turning their own arguments against them, by showing them that it was all their own fault for not having trained her to suit the men of that century; that she would be compelled to adopt her husband’s way of thinking or he must adopt hers, that they had made the former course impossible by the way she had been brought up, and that the latter was just what she wanted.  “Give me,” said she, “a man who holds the same opinions as I do, or one who will be willing to learn them from me, and I will marry him; but until then, why do you scold me?  Pity me; I am miserable, but not mad.  Is the heart controlled by the will?  Did my father not ask that very question?  Is it my fault if I love what has no existence?  I am no visionary; I desire no prince, I seek no Telemachus, I know he is only an imaginary person; I seek some one like him.  And why should there be no such person, since there is such a person as I, I who feel that my heart is like his?  No, let us not wrong humanity so greatly, let us not think that an amiable and virtuous man is a figment of the imagination.  He exists, he lives, perhaps he is seeking me; he is seeking a soul which is capable of love for him.  But who is he, where is he?  I know not; he is not among those I have seen; and no doubt I shall never see him.  Oh! mother, why did you make virtue too attractive?  If I can love nothing less, you are more to blame than I.”

Must I continue this sad story to its close?  Must I describe the long struggles which preceded it?  Must I show an impatient mother exchanging her former caresses for severity?  Must I paint an angry father forgetting his former promises, and treating the most virtuous of daughters as a mad woman?  Must I portray the unhappy girl, more than ever devoted to her imaginary hero, because of the persecution brought upon her by that devotion, drawing nearer step by step to her death, and descending into the grave when they were about to force her to the altar?  No; I will not dwell upon these gloomy scenes; I have no need to go so far to show, by what I consider a sufficiently striking example, that in spite of the prejudices arising from the manners of our age, the enthusiasm for the good and the beautiful is no more foreign to women than to men, and that there is nothing which, under nature’s guidance, cannot be obtained from them as well as from us.

You stop me here to inquire whether it is nature which teaches us to take such pains to repress our immoderate desires.  No, I reply, but neither is it nature who gives us these immoderate desires.  Now, all that is not from nature is contrary to nature, as I have proved again and again.