brilliancy; all combine to make her a distinct type, and the queen of her sex.
****
When a Frenchman and a Frenchwoman converse together, they can seldom forget that one is a man and the other a woman. It does not prove that a Frenchwoman must necessarily be, and is, affected in her relations with men; but it explains why she does not feel, as the American woman does, that a man and a woman can enjoy a tête-à-tête free from all those commonplace flatteries, compliments, and platitudes that badly understood gallantry suggests. Many American ladies have made me forget, by the easiness of their manner, and the charm and naturalness of their conversation, that I was speaking with women, and with lovely ones too. This I could never have forgotten in the company of French ladies.
On account of this feeling, and perhaps also of the difference which exists between the education received by a man and that received by a woman in France, the conversation will always be on some light topics, literary, artistic, dramatic, social, or other. Indeed, it would be most unbecoming for a man to start a very serious subject of conversation with a French lady to whom he had just been introduced. He would be taken for a pedant or a man of bad breeding.
"They would just push me away."
In America, men and women receive practically the same education, and this of course enlarges the circle of conversational topics between the sexes. I shall always remember a beautiful American girl, not more than twenty years of age, to whom I was once introduced in a New York drawing-room, as she was giving to a lady sitting next to her a most minute description of the latest bonnet invented in Paris, and who, turning towards me, asked me point blank if I had read M. Ernest Renan's last book, "The History of the People of Israel." Well, I had not. I had to confess that I had not yet had time to read it. But she had, and she gave me, without the remotest touch of affectation or pedantry, a most interesting, detailed, and learned analysis of that remarkable book, almost in one breath with the description of the Paris bonnet. I related this incident in "Jonathan and his Continent." On reading it, some of my countrymen, critics and others, exclaimed: "We imagine the fair American girl wore a pair of gold spectacles."
"No, my dear compatriots, nothing of the sort. No gold spectacles, no guy. It was a beautiful girl, dressed with the most exquisite taste and care, and most charming and womanly."
An American woman, however learned she may be, is a sound politician, and she knows that the best thing she can make of herself is a woman, and she remains a woman. She will always make herself as attractive as she possibly can, not to please men, to please herself. If in a French drawing-room I were to remark to a lady how clever some woman in the room looked, she would probably closely examine that woman's dress to find out what I thought was wrong about it. It would probably be the same in England, but not in America.
A Frenchwoman will seldom be jealous of another woman's cleverness. She will far more readily forgive her this quality than beauty. "Oh! how I should like to be a man!" once exclaimed a French lady in my presence. An American lady would probably have said to her: "My dear, you are ever so much better as you are!"
