VIII
It is no part of the plan here to trace the causes of the decadence in which men lost their liberty of thought and women their position. Greed of money, greed of power, love of pleasure, the growth of luxury, and the low ideals that surely follow in their train, brought their logical results. The flower of estheticism that expands in the rich splendors of its ripe perfection verges already toward its dissolution. Then the Roman Catholic reaction, which forbade men to think, sent women back to prayers and seclusion, as a business instead of a resource; it was becoming, and quite safe. But the Italian princesses had set a fashion of knowledge, and of putting society on an intellectual plane, with what trimming of beauty and adornment of manners they could add. The irrepressible and many-gifted Marguerite of Navarre took it up with various changes and originalities of her own. The clever Frenchwomen saw their opportunity, and when the courts were sunk in vice and inanities, they drew out of the past its secret of social power, and created the literary salon, which was one of the glories of the golden age of France. The wave of knowledge which had raised the Italian women so high, and then so strangely receded, culminated again in the intellectual brilliancy and unparalleled influence of the Frenchwomen of the eighteenth century. The rise and fall of this movement and its central figures I have treated quite fully elsewhere. Again the wave receded, with the coming of the republic, to revive under other forms in our own country and our own day. Will another decadence follow? The future alone can tell, and no prophetic sibyl has read the secret of that future. Possibly it will depend largely upon the poise and sanity of women themselves.