Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Part IV - II
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THE CONFESSION OF A FOOL 253
blue-stockings of the civilised world. After having
read Man and Woman, by Emile Girardin, I could
well understand that this movement was bound to
result in great advantages to the hostile camp of the
women.
To depose man and put woman in his place by the
re-introduction of the matriarchate ; to dethrone the true
lord of creation who evolved civilisation, spread the
benefits of culture, created all great ideals, art, the
professions, all that there is great and beautiful in the
world, and crown woman who, with few exceptions, has
not shared in the great work of civilisation, constituted
to me a challenge to my sex. The very thought of having
to witness the apotheosis of those intelligences of the iron
age, those manlike creatures, those semi-apes, that pack
of dangerous animals, roused my manhood. It was
strange, but I was cured of my illness, cured through my
intense repugance to an enemy who, though intellectually
my inferior, was more than a match for me on account of
her complete lack of moral feeling.
In a tribal war the less honest, the more crafty, tribe
generally remains in possession of the battlefield. The
more a man respects woman, the more leisure he leaves her
to arm and prepare herself for the fight, the smaller are
his prospects of winning the battle. I determined to take
tlie matter seriously. I armed myself for this new duel
and wrote a book which I flung, like a gauntlet, at the
feet of the emancipated women, those fools who demanded
freedom at the price of man’s bondage.
In the following spring we changed our hotel. Our
new abode was a kind of purgatory where I was con-
tinually watched by twenty-five Avomen who, incidentally,
furnished me with copy for my book.
In three months’ time the volume was ready for publica-
tion. It was a collection of stories of matrimonial life
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