Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/43

Rh in an age when men sought their highest honor in throwing each other from the horse, or in other ways breaking each other's necks.

At a later period the position of woman in France especially claims our attention. There, according to the national character, chivalry took on a more spiritual expression and a more graceful form, and from the chivalrous gallantry which inspired the Duke de la Rochefoucault with the verses (on Madame de Longueville):

 Pour màriter son coeur, Pour plaire ses beaux yeux J'ai fait la guerre aux rois, Je l'aurais faite aux dieux

love for women passed through various phases of fastidiousness and frivolity till it reached that bright relationship in which the "beautiful" and "strong" minds of the Ninons and their lovers at the time found their greatest happiness. But also this relationship, upon which the reflection of court-life so often cast its splendor, and which can furnish no standard for the average position of women, rarely was an entirely true and satisfactory one, and was moreover confined only to certain circles. Through it a sphere was opened only for social life in which women had to seek compensation for the deprivations of political life, while complete political and social liberty must form, as it were, the atmosphere in which the flower of love unfolds itself.