title: The Lady and the Virgin: Image, Attitude, and Experience in Twelfth-Century France (Women in Culture and Society)
author:  Penny Schine Gold 
description: Penny Schine Gold is associate professor of history at Knox College.
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  # The Letters Of Madame De Sabran
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### By Henry James
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  This page copyright © 2004 Munsey's.
  
  
  http://www.munseys.com
  
      
  
  EText by Ian Hillman
  
  
  
  
  
  THE present century in France has been the golden age of editors. It
  
  
  might have been supposed that the mine of literary wealth bequeathed to
  
  
  that country by the eighteenth century had been exhausted, and that the
  
  
  occupation of the exhibitory fraternity was gone. The mine has been
  
  
  worked with extraordinary industry, and with the most perfect
  
  
  appliances of erudition and criticism, and its contents have been
  
  
  brought to light in particles of all dimensions—-in massive boulders,
  
  
  such as only the more skilled engineers might safely transport, in
  
  
  fragments convenient for immediate use, and in barely ponderable powder
  
  
  and dust. More even than our own time, the eighteenth century was an
  
  
  age of scribbling. This indeed is untrue if taken in the sense that the
  