In matters of sentiment, the public has very crude ideas; and the most shocking fault of women is that they make the public the supreme judge of their lives.
The great majority of men, especially in France, both desire and possess a fashionable woman, much in the way one might own a fine horse – as a luxury befitting a young man.
It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.
