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Weekly Chats I. The Woman

'A tout seigneur tout honneur' and so it is right that from you all begins the lovable, better half of the human race–So pay attention, dear readers, because this time my words are directed at you! 'The Woman!' Who has ever been able to define this creature? Who has ever been able to physiologize her (please excuse the primitive word)? Who has ever been able to answer the thousands of questions aimed at her little heart?...–No one. A woman is the philosophical stone of science; she is harder to find than it is to square a circle...You will reach her by traveling by hot air balloon, but a woman will never be painted – in the true moral sense. And why? –Oh, she is a superior creation that us poor blind men cannot understand...or even one of things that is so common that thinking about it exhausts your mind, and then you are left with nothing– I hurry to tell you, sweet readers, that I support the first hypothesis more than the second. And yet you see, I have wanted to study you all, I have wanted to see if nothing consisted of this difficult 'rebus' and oh, it pains me to tell you that my observations were thrown away, my scrutinizing lens fogged up. The more I wrapped myself in the hidden recesses of your souls and the more convinced I was that I had entered a labyrinth I could not get out of. And is this mystery that surrounds you a virtue or a flaw? Ask a lover who has been betrayed and abandoned – he will tell you it is a flaw, a horrible flaw.–

Ask a young man whose sweetheart has just squeezed his hand in love, or has just said, 'I love you,' and he will tell you that this mystery is a divine thing, that it is sacrosanct veil that conceals woman's divinity like the translucent veil hides the angelic beauty of Mohammed's 'Houri.'

Go pick whoever is right among the two: the scornful skeptical or the impassioned flatterer!–I would put you at my feet, sweet readers, and you