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CHAPTER VIII.

THE PALAIS ROYAL IN 1790-THE FREEDOM OF WOMEN-THE JACOBIN CAVE.

THE right of women to equality, their influence in political power, was claimed in 1790 by two men, unlike in every respect; one, an eloquent speaker, with a bold and romantic mind; the other, grave, and the most powerful man of the time. We must again carry the reader into the heat of the contest.

Let us return to the Palais Royal, the place where the Revolution commenced on the 12th July, at the Circus, which then occupied the middle of the garden. Passing by this excited crowd, these noisy groups, these swarms of women devoted to the liberty of nature, we cross a narrow avenue of trees, choked and encumbered with underwood; by this dark passage, we descend fifteen steps, and we are in the middle of the Circus.

There is preaching! What is to be expected in this place, in a reunion so worldly, with its mingling of equivocal pretty women? At the first glance, we would say it was a sermon to young girls. But no, the assembly is a graver one. I recognize a number of literary men, of academicians; at the foot of the tribune is seated M. de Condorcet.

Is the orator a priest? Judging from his dress, yes; he was a handsome man, of about forty, with an excited, violent, and sometimes dry speech; he had no unction, a fearless and slightly visionary countenance. Preacher, poet, or prophet, no matter, it was the abbé Fauchet. This Saint Paul was talking between two Theclas; one of them never left him, following him, bon gré, mal gré, to the club and to the altar, so great was her fervor; the other lady was Madam Palm Ælder, a Hollander, who, with a kind heart and noble mind, was the orator of women, preaching their emancipation.

These vague aspirations took a fixed, decided form, in the learned dissertations of the illustrious secretary of the Academy of Sciences, Condorcet; who, on the 3d July, 1790, wrote with clearness a

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demand for the admission of women to the rights of citizens. To the friend of Voltaire, the last of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, can lawfully be added the title of being among the precursors of Socialism.

But if we want to see women in the height of their political action, we must leave the Palais Royal, and advance a little further in the street St. Honoré. The brilliant association of Jacobins at this epoch, which counted a crowd of nobles and all the literary men of the time, occupied a church of the old monks, and, a kind of welllighted crypt, under the church, gave an asylum to a fraternal society of workmen, to whom at certain hours the Jacobins explained the Constitution. In the questions of sustenance or of public danger, these workmen did not come alone; anxious wives and mothers, driven by domestic sufferings, and the wants of their children, accompanied their husbands, in order to learn the evils and remedies of their situation. Several unmarried women, or those whose husbands were working at the time, came and disputed alone. First

and touching origin of the society of women.

Who suffered more than they during the Re

volution? Who found the months and years longest? From this time they became more excited than the men. Marat was very well satisfied with them (30th December, '90); he found pleasure in contrasting the energy of these women of the people, in their subterranean hall, with the unfruitful talking of the Jacobin Assembly, who were chattering above them.

CHAPTER IX.

THE SALONS-MADAME DE STAËL.

THE genius of Madame de Staël has been successively swayed by two masters and two ideas, in 1789 by Rousseau, and afterwards by Montesquieu.

In 1789 she was twenty-three years old, and was exercising an all-powerful influence over Necker, her father, whom she passionately loved, and governed by enthusiasm. If it had not been for his zealous daughter, the Genevese banker would never have advanced so far in the revolutionary road. She was full of fire and confidence, and had a firm belief in the good sense of mankind. She had not yet been influenced and weakened by the mediocre lovers who afterwards surrounded her. Madame de Staël has always been guided by love; that which she entertained for her father required that Necker

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