Tallemont des Réaux, who began to write his Historiettes in 1657, says of the Marquise de Rambouillet: "Elle est un peu trop délicate ... on n'oscrait prononcer le mot de cul. Cela va dans l'excès." Half a century later, in England, Mandeville, in the Remarks appended to his Fable of the Bees, refers to the almost prudish modesty inculcated on children from their earliest years.
In one of its civilized developments, this ritualized modesty becomes prudery, which is defined by Forel (Die Sexuelle Frage, Fifth ed., p. 125) as "codified sexual morality." Prudery is fossilized modesty, and no longer reacts vitally. True modesty, in an intelligent civilized person, is instinctively affected by motives and circumstances, responding sensitively to its relationships.
Memoires de Madame d'Epinay, Part I, Ch. V. Thirty years earlier, Mandeville had written, in England, that "the modesty of women is the result of custom and education."