Madame Leverdet—Without fine distinctions?
De Ryons—Without fine distinctions.
Madame Leverdet—What is one to do in the case of those who are not—good women?
De Ryons—They must be consoled.
Madame Leverdet—And those who are?
De Ryons—They must be guaranteed against being anything else; and as to that process of guarantee I have taken a patent.
Madame Leverdet—Come now, if you are playing in parlor theatricals, say so. What are you trying to be,—Lovelace or Don Quixote?
De Ryons—I am neither the one nor the other. I am a man who, having nothing else to do, took to studying women just as another man studies beetles and minerals, only I am under the impression that my scientific study is more interesting and more useful than that of the other savant—because we meet your sex everywhere. We meet the mother, the sister, the daughter, the wife, the woman who is in love; and it is important to be well informed upon such an eternal associate in our lives. Now I am a man of my time, exercised over one theory or another, hardly knowing what he must believe, good or bad, but inclined to believe in good when occasion presents itself. I respect women who respect themselves.... It is not I who created the world; I take it as I find it.... And as to marriage, the day when I shall find a young girl with the four qualities of goodness of heart, sound health, thorough self-respect, and cheerfulness,—the squaring of the conjugal hypothenuse,—then I count for nothing all my long term of waiting; like the great Doctor Faust, I become young again, and such as I am, I give myself to her. My friend, if this same young girl of whom you have been speaking (and by the way, I know her just as well as you do) really unites these conditions,—I do not believe she does so, though I shall see very soon,—why then, I will marry her to-morrow—I will marry her to-night. But in the mean time, as I have positively nothing to do,—if you happen to know a self-respecting woman who needs to be kept from a bit of folly ... why, I am wholly at your service.
Translated for 'A Library of the World's Best Literature,' by E. Irenæus Stevenson