[1] I regret to be unable to find in the Italian manuscript the quotation of an official source for this fact; I hope it may be found possible to deny it.
[2] Memoirs of Madame de Staël, Collé, Duclos, the Margrave of Bayreuth.
[3] The first volume.
CHAPTER LV[(43)]
OBJECTIONS TO THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN
"But women are charged with the petty labours of the household." The Colonel of my regiment, M. S——, has four daughters, brought up on the best principles, which means that they work all day. When I come, they sing the music of Rossini, that I brought them from Naples. For the rest, they read the Bible of Royaumont, they learn what's most foolish in history, that is to say, chronological tables and the verses of Le Ragois; they know a great deal of geography, embroider admirably—and I expect that each of these pretty little girls could earn, by her work, eight sous a day. Taking three hundred days, that means four hundred and eighty francs a year, which is less than is given to one of their masters. It is for four hundred and eighty francs a year that they lose for ever the time, during which it is granted to the human machine to acquire ideas.
"If women read with pleasure the ten or twelve good volumes that appear every year in Europe, they will soon give up the care of their children."—'Tis as if we feared, by planting the shore of the ocean with trees, to stop the motion of the waves. It is not in this sense that education is all-powerful. Besides, for four hundred years the same objection has been offered to every sort of education. And yet a Parisian woman has more good qualities in 1820 than she ever had in 1720, the age of Law's system and the Regency, and at that time the daughter of the richest farmer-general had a less good education than the daughter of the pettiest attorney gets to-day. Are her household duties less well performed as a result? Certainly not. And why? Because poverty, illness, shame, instinct, all force her to fulfil them. It is as if you said of an officer who is becoming too sociable, that he will forget how to handle his horse; you have to remember that he'll break his arm the first time he's slack in the saddle.
Knowledge, where it produces any bad effects at all, does as much mischief to one sex as to the other. We shall never lack vanity, even in the completest absence of any reason for having it—look at the middle class in a small town. Why not force it at least to repose on real merit, on merit useful or agreeable to society?
Demi-fools, carried away by the revolution that is changing everything in France, began twenty years ago to allow that women are capable of something. But they must give themselves up to occupations becoming their sex: educate flowers, make friendships with birds, and pick up plants. These are called innocent amusements.