The verisimilitude that modern writers strove to attain, and the artfulness that they deployed to imitate the truth only enhance the prestige of the violent and dangerous sentiments that they sought to awaken in their female readers: In the early centuries of French gallantry and manners, the less perfected minds of women were content with stories and accounts as marvellous as they were unbelievable; but now they want credible facts, and emotions so marvellous that their own are quite moved and confounded; and then they cast all around them in real life to find the marvels that so enchanted them in literature, but everything seems lifeless and devoid of sentiment, as what they seek is not to be found in nature.