LETTER LXVI.
IN WHICH OUR CORRESPONDENT ASTONISHES US BY ENGAGING IN SINGLE COMBAT WITH M. MICHELET, AND DEMOLISHING "L'AMOUR" AND "LA FEMME."
Washington, D. C., Sept. 4th, 1862.
While I was lounging in a banker's drawing-room this morning, my boy, waiting for the filthy lucre chap to come down and say that he was glad to see me, I chanced to see the eternal "L'Amour" and "La Femme" lying upon a table in the apartment. The sight threw me into a bad humor, for I detest those books, my boy, and wish the United States of America had never seen them.
Monsieur Michelet, a French individual of questionable morals, first writes a book about "Love," and then clinches it with one about "Woman." It is hardly necessary to add, that he treats both subjects in a thoroughly French manner, and makes one a continuation of the other. Love is a charming little story in every man's life, "complete in one number"—Number one. Woman is a love-story, "to be continued" until, like all other continued stories, it ends with marriage!
Such is the logic implied by Monsieur Michelet's two books, and whether it is calculated to elevate or degrade the weaker sex, a majority of educated
American women have eagerly read the books and accepted the sentiments as so many compliments. And the men? They leisurely rove through the leaves of monsieur's mental Valambrosa, and say: "How Frenchy!" And in that natural exclamation we find the most complete and just criticism of "L'Amour" and "La Femme" possible to American lips or pen.
This Michelet, my boy, is a man of talent and remarkably clear poetical perception. He is as much like Hallam as a Frenchman can be like an Englishman, and France honors him for his development of the poetry of her history; but is that any reason why he should be accepted as the modern High-priest of Love and the Censor of Woman? By no means. Madame de Stael was thinking of a Frenchman when she wrote: "Love is only an episode in man's life"—and may have referred to herself when she added: "but it is woman's whole existence." Had an American woman spoken this, we should suspect the sentiment to be nothing more than the reproach of a disappointed passion; but of the Frenchman it is indisputably true, as well as of woman wherever we find her.