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 approaches the ideal paradise, the mundane city peopled with brilliant personages.

In all things the French bourgeoise is more difficult to divert than her aristocratic sister. She is much more particular and infinitely more restricted in her ideas upon feminine liberty. While the women of the upper class arrogate to themselves the right to amuse themselves in whatever fashion they like, with lovers or without them, bicycling, skating, shooting, on horseback, in automobile (the Duchesse d'Uzès was the first Frenchwoman to obtain a certificate as woman driver of the motor-car), private theatricals, they can smoke or scale the mountains of the moon with impunity. All these varied avenues of distraction are rigorously denied the bourgeoise. She is the most conventional of creatures, and anything like marked originality in one of her sex terrifies her and fills her with distrust. She was bred in the conviction that girls should resemble their great-grandmothers, be clothed until marriage in the integrity of imbecility, and after marriage in the narrowness of piety, and know no other amusements than those strictly suitable to a "feminine" woman. The path her mother and grandmother trod is the path she must never deviate from. She must be just as religious as they were, taking care, however, to follow the fashions of her own class, in order to guard