It is no part of the plan here to trace the causes of the decadence
in which men lost their liberty of thought and women their position.
Greed of money, greed of power, love of pleasure, the growth of
luxury, and the low ideals that surely follow in their train, brought
their logical results. The flower of estheticism that expands in
the rich splendors of its ripe perfection verges already toward its
dissolution. Then the Roman Catholic reaction, which forbade men to
think, sent women back to prayers and seclusion, as a business instead
of a resource; it was becoming, and quite safe. But the Italian
princesses had set a fashion of knowledge, and of putting society on
an intellectual plane, with what trimming of beauty and adornment of
manners they could add. The irrepressible and many-gifted Marguerite
of Navarre took it up with various changes and originalities of her
own. The clever Frenchwomen saw their opportunity, and when the courts
were sunk in vice and inanities, they drew out of the past its secret
of social power, and created the literary salon, which was one of
the glories of the golden age of France. The wave of knowledge which
had raised the Italian women so high, and then so strangely receded,
culminated again in the intellectual brilliancy and unparalleled
influence of the Frenchwomen of the eighteenth century. The rise and
fall of this movement and its central figures I have treated quite
fully elsewhere. Again the wave receded, with the coming of the
republic, to revive under other forms in our own country and our own
day. Will another decadence follow? The future alone can tell, and no
prophetic sibyl has read the secret of that future. Possibly it will
depend largely upon the poise and sanity of women themselves.