perhaps, for many of our illusions, that the golden age, which is
always receding, is seen at such long range that only the softly
colored outlines are visible. Men and women are transfigured in
the rosy light that rests on historic heights as on far-off
mountain tops. But if we bring them into closer view, and turn
on the pitiless light of truth, the aureole vanishes, a thousand
hidden defects are exposed, and our idol stands out hard and
bare, too often divested of its divinity and its charm.

To do justice to these women, we must take the point of view of
an age that was corrupt to the core. It is needless to discuss
here the merits of the stormy, disenchanting eighteenth century,
which was the mother of our own, and upon which the world is
likely to remain hopelessly divided. But whatever we may think of
its final outcome, it can hardly be denied that this period,
which in France was so powerful in ideas, so active in thought,
so teeming with intelligence, so rich in philosophy, was poor in
faith, bankrupt in morals, without religion, without poetry, and
without imagination. The divine ideals of virtue and
renunciation were drowned in a sea of selfishness and
materialism. The austere devotion of Pascal was out of fashion.
The spiritual teachings of Bossuet and Fenelon represented the
out-worn creeds of an age that was dead. It was Voltaire who
gave the tone, and even Voltaire was not radical enough for many
of these iconoclasts. "He is a bigot and a deist," exclaimed a
feminine disciple of d'Holbach's atheism. The gay, witty,
pleasure-loving abbe, who derided piety, defied morality, was the
pet of the salon, and figured in the worst scandals, was a fair
representative of the fashionable clergy who had no attribute of
priesthood but the name, and clearly justified the sneers of the