Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/88

Rh content that her husband should make a fool of himself about Blanche Souris, or anybody else, so long as he walked arm-in-arm now and then with Des Gommeux, and called him "mon cher,"—was indeed in every iota the true Femme Galante of the 19th century.

The Femme Galante has passed through many various changes, in many countries. The dames of the Decamerone were unlike the fair athlete-seekers of the days of Horace; and the powdered coquettes of the years of Molière, were sisters only by the kinship of a common vice to the frivolous and fragile faggot of impulses, that is called Frou-frou.

The Femme Galante has always been a feature in every age; poets from Juvenal to Musset, have railed at her; artists, from Titian to Winterhalter, have painted her; dramatists, from Aristophanes to Congreve and Dumas Fils, have pointed their arrows at her; satirists, from Archilochus and Simonides to Hogarth and Gavarni, have poured out their aqua-fortis for her. But the real Femme Galante of to-day has been missed hitherto.

Rh