[76] Thus, in a letter of hers to Mme. de Lauzun occurs a sentence like the following: "Il lia sy lontant que je n'ay antandu parler de vous." The duchess of Monpensier, daughter of Gaston d'Orleans, in a letter to her father exhibits a similar ignorance of her own language, when she writes: "J'ai cru que Votre Altesse seret bien ése de savoir sete istoire." Quoted by Rousselot in his Histoire de l'Éducation des Femmes en France, Tom. I, p. 287.
[77] Les Femmes Savantes, Act II, Scene 7.
[78] Destouches, in his L'Homme singulier, makes one of his female characters, who loves study, speak in the following pathetic fashion:
"A learned woman ought—so I surmise—
Conceal her knowledge, or she'll be unwise.
If pedantry a mental blemish be
At all times outlawed by society,
If 'gainst a pedant all the world inveighs,
Shall pass unchecked in woman pedant's ways?
I hold it sure, condemned my sex is quite
To trifling nothings as its sole birthright;
Ridiculous 'tis thought outside its 'sphere';
The learned woman dare not such appear;
Nay, she must even cloak her brilliancy
So envy leave in peace stupidity;
Must keep the level of the common kind,
To subjects commonplace devote her mind,
And treating these she must be like the rest.
Lo, in such garb refinement must be dressed:
That knowledge shall not make her seem unwise,
She must herself in foolishness disguise."
—Act III, Scene 7.
[79] No one, however, went so far in his opposition to the education of women as the notorious Silvain Maréchal, the author of Projet d'une Loi portant Defense d'Apprendre à Lire aux Femmes, who would have a law passed forbidding women to learn to read. He maintained that a knowledge of science and letters interfered with their being good housekeepers. "Reason," he avers, "does not approve of women studying chemistry. Women who are unable to read make the best soup. I would rather," he declares in the words of Balzac, "have a wife with a beard than a wife who is educated." See pp. 40, 50 and 51, of the edition of this strange work, published at Brussels, 1847.
[80] In her Problema Practicum, addressed to Dr. Rivet, Anna van Schurman states and develops in true syllogistic form a series of propositions in defense of her thesis in favor of the higher education of women. Two of these propositions are here given as illustrative of her points of view:
I. Cui natura inest scientiarum artiumque desiderium, ei conveniunt scientiæ et artes. Atque feminæ natura inest scientiarum artiumque desiderium. Ergo.
II Quidquid intellectum hominis perficit et exornat, id femmæ Christianæ convenit. Atqui scientiæ et artes intellectum hominis perficiunt et exornant. Ergo. See Nobiliss. Virginis Annæ Schurman Opuscula, pp. 35 and 41, Leyden, 1656, and her De Ingenii Muliebris ad Doctrinam et Meliores Literas Aptitudine, Leyden, 1641. Cf. also Anna van Schurman, Chap. IV, by Una Birch, London, 1909.
[81] A writer of the seventeenth century gives the following as the popular programme of female study: "To learn alle pointes of good housewifery, spinning of linen, the ordering of dairies, to see to the salting of meate, brewing, bakery, and to understand the common prices of all houshold provisions. To keepe account of all things, to know the condition of the poultry—for it misbecomes no woman to be a hen-wife. To know how to order your clothes and with frugality to mend them and to buy but what is necessary with ready money. To love to keep at home." How like the German four K's and the words on the sarcophagus of a Roman matron—lanifica, frugi, domiseda—a diligent plyer of the distaff, thrifty and a stay-at-home.
[82] The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Vol. II, p. 5, Bohn Edition, 1887.