I would wish if I were legislator that they should adopt in France
as in Germany the custom of _soirées dansantes_. Four times a month
the young girls go with their mothers to a ball beginning at seven
o'clock, ending at midnight and requiring for all expense, a violin
and some glasses of water. In an adjacent room, the mothers perhaps
a little jealous of the happy education of their daughters play at
cards, in a third the fathers find the newspapers and talk politics.
Between midnight and one o'clock all the family are reunited and
have regained the paternal roof. The young girls learn to know the
young men, the fatuity, and the indiscretion that follows it, become
quickly odious, in a word they learn how to choose a husband. Some
young girls have unfortunate love affairs, but the number of
deceived husbands and unhappy households (_mauvaises ménages_)
diminishes in immense proportion.
For an iron education in cold virtue there is no school like the
position of sitting master to the wall flowers at a church sociable, but
it is humbly conjectured that even the austere morality of a bald headed
Prude might receive an added iciness if he would but attend one of these
simple dancing bouts disguised as a sweet young girl.