The English are exalted and melancholy, cold and unnatural.
The German women are tender and sweet, but colorless and monotonous. The
French are spirituelle, elegant, and voluptuous, but they lie like
demons.
"Above all, do not accuse women of being what they are; we have made them
thus, undoing the work of nature.
"Nature, who thinks of everything, made the virgin for love; but with her
first child her bosom loses its form, her beauty its freshness. Woman is
made for motherhood. Man would perhaps abandon her, disgusted by the loss
of beauty; but his child clings to him and weeps. Behold the family, the
human law; everything that departs from this law is monstrous.
"Civilization thwarts the ends of nature. In our cities, according to our
customs, the virgin destined by nature for the open air, made to bask in
the sunlight, to admire the nude wrestlers, as in Lacedemonia, to choose,
and to love, is shut up in close confinement and bolted in; yet she hides
romance under her cross; pale and idle she fades away and loses in the
silence of the nights that beauty that stifles her and which has need of
the open air. Then she is suddenly taken from this solitude, knowing
nothing, loving nothing, desiring everything; an old woman instructs her,
a mysterious word is whispered in her ear, and she is thrown into the
arms of a stranger. There you have marriage--that is to say, the
civilized family.
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