They leave the boarding-school _virgins_, but chaste, never.

Let us then represent the world as it la, women such as they are, and not
such as they ought to be; let us call things by their names, and when there
is moral deformity somewhere, let us show that deformity.

When we make wonders of the heroines of a novel, possessing the charms of
the _three Graces_ and the virtues of the seven sages of Greece, who when
they fall, fall in spite of themselves, impelled by a fatal concurrence of
circumstances, but with so much candour and innocence, that we cannot do
otherwise than pardon their fall and even fail to comprehend that they have
fallen, we are completely amazed when we descend from this imaginary world
to enter the world of reality.

The idealization of woman has therefore, besides other faults, that of
causing as to take a dislike to our ordinary companions. How, indeed, after
being present at the devotion of Sophonisba, at the suicide of the chaste
Lucretia, at the display of the virtues of Mademoiselle Agnes, and at that
of the form of Venus at the bath, can we contemplate with ravished eye the
wife no less plain than lawful, who is sitting with sullen air at our
fire-side, who has no other care than that of her person, no other moral
capital than a round enough sum of prejudices and follies, and whose
charms, finally, resemble more those of a Hottentot Venus than those of
Venus Aphrodite.

The picture of virtues is an excellent thing, but still it is necessary
that these virtues should exist. We must not enunciate an idea simply
because it is moral, but because it is true. _Amicus Plato, sed magis amica
veritas_.