"There is the great secret, my child, the key to which you must seize. By
whatever process of reasoning debauchery may be defended, it will be
proven that it is natural at a given day, hour or evening, but not
to-morrow nor every day. There is not a people on earth which has not
considered woman either the companion and consolation of man or the
sacred instrument of life, and has not under these two forms honored her.
And yet here is an armed warrior who leaps into the abyss that God has
dug with his own hands between man and brute; as well might he deny the
fact. What mute Titian is this who dares repress under the kisses of the
body the love of the thought, and place on human lips the stigma of the
brute, the seal of eternal silence?
"There is a word that should be studied. There breathes under the wind of
those dismal forests that are called secrets of the body, one of those
mysteries that the angels of destruction whisper in the ear of night as
it descends upon the earth. That man is better or worse than God has made
him. His bowels are like those of sterile women, where nature has not
completed her work, or there is distilled in the shadow some venomous
poison.
"Ah! yes, neither occupation nor study have been able to cure you, my
friend. To forget and to learn, that is your device. You finger the
leaves of dead books; you are too young for ruins. Look about you, the
pale herd of men surrounds you.
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