all his praise of the intelligence and grace of the Parisiennes, Saint-
Preux confides to his beloved that he "finds their overtures shocking,
their flirtation repulsive, their manners devoid of modesty" ( NH, II,
XXI). Although Rousseau cannot help but admire these women for
their "common sense, reason, humanity and goodness of nature," he
yet concludes that none of these qualities could make them lovable,
for they are nothing but meritorious honorary men, lacking in what
were for him the ultimate feminine qualities of sweetness and gentle-
ness.

The social and cultural roles of women continued to be debated,
sometimes cordially, sometime viciously, through the Revolution
itself, finally leading Staël to report, in 1800, that "since the revolu-
tion, men have thought it politically and morally useful to reduce
women to the most absurd mediocrity." We must recall that the
Revolution had been a heady moment of rising hopes for many
women, as it was for all other classes of the dispossessed and unen-
franchised. Women in groups and as individuals had, in numerous
cahiers, set forth their grievances against their conditions of work,
their lack of property rights or of education. Whereas some of their
pleas were heard in the early expansive years of the Revolution,
others went unheeded; and by the rum of the century, a number of
gains, like divorce, had been attenuated or lost, especially with the
institution of the Napoleonic Code in 1804.

The misogynist publicist and pamphleteer Sylvain Maréchal had
reflected in his 1801 satire, Project for a law prohibiting women from
learning to read, the final emergence into dominance of a maternal
female ideal.

If the tree of knowledge is forbidden to you
In the gentlest of ignorance you'll dwell without rue,
As guardians of virtue and mothers of pleasure;
You'll live, with your innocent pasttimes, at leisure. ¹

This tendency to substitute models of motherhood for those of
grace and charm, a tendency which long antedates the Revolution
and is visible in such paintings as Greuze "Well-Beloved Mother,"
achieved true primacy in precisely the period of Stael's maturity.
Spurning the Old Regime's adulation of the women of the court and

-viii-