Note 2 — Chapter XIII · THE GOLD BEETLES: THEIR FOOD

What was woman in the old days? What she still is in the East: a pretty little animal without a soul. The question was discussed at great length by the scholars. The great seventeenth-century bishop Bossuet2 himself, looked upon woman as the diminutive of man. The proof lay in the origin of Eve: she was the superfluous bone, the thirteenth rib which Adam had in the beginning. It has at last been admitted that woman possesses a soul similar to our own and even its superior in tenderness and devotion. She has been permitted to educate herself, which she does with a zeal at least equal to that of her rival. But the law, that gloomy cavern which is still the lurking-place of so many barbarities, continues to regard her as incompetent, as a minor.