—­They are vice incarnate, and know how to employ every means to seduce.  Religion, the confessional, the bible, the Mass, Vespers, the New Testament, all the holy business is an auxiliary for them.  For instance, conceive anything more disgusting than that pardon promised beforehand to guilty women.  Play the whore all your life, deceive your husband, have fifty lovers, provided that at the end you lament your faults, God will have only tenderness for you, and will receive you with open arms.  I should like to know if by chance their Jesus had taken a wife, what would have been his opinion then of the woman taken in adultery; but he remained single and consequently incompetent to decide upon that delicate matter.  All that, you see, is an encouragement to debauchery and a stimulant to lewdness.  A devout woman, when she is young and pretty, is on a slope which leads quite straight to Monsieur le Cure’s bed.

XVIII.

THE VISIT.

  “Stupefied, the pedant closed his
  mouth, and opened his eyes.”

  LEON CLADEL (Titi Foyssac IV).

If there are any beings as blind as the husbands, they are certainly the fathers; with the latter, as with the former, blindness reaches its utmost limits.  Since Moliere no one laughs at them any more, and I don’t know why, for they always deserve to be laughed at, while all the sarcasms have fallen on the head of the unhappy husbands.

Folly and injustice!  Conjugal love is as respectable as paternal affection.  Love is as good as affection, and what the heart chooses is quite as good as what the blood gives you.

Why then do they complain if it is papa who is deceived, and laugh if it is a husband.  Exactly the contrary ought to occur.  Paternal love is egotistic.  It is for the most part vanity and self-love.  The father looks for his own likeness in his offspring, and if he believes himself to be an eagle, his son naturally must be an eaglet.  Most frequently he is only a foolish gosling, but the father insists on finding on him an eagle’s plumes.  If then he is deceived in his hopes, which are only a deduction from his own infatuation, it is certainly permissible to laugh at it.

While the husband....

This is what I observed to Durand, which put him in a great passion.

—­Because my daughter has gone to Mass?  And you say:  “fathers are blind.”  Here is a self-contradictory individual.  One can see plainly that you are not a father, or you would alter your theories.  Hang it!  You can’t say I am enchanted at it, but you must put yourself in a man’s place.  She is a child, who leaves school, mark that well, where she was obliged, compelled to perform her religious duties, and one does not break off in a couple of days the habits of ten years like that.  Give her time to reach it.  I reason with her; hang it, I can’t do everything in a day.  When she goes from time to time to Mass, on Sunday, it does not follow that she is becoming religious.  I am a free-thinker, but I am a father also, and what would you have a father do when two pretty arms take hold of your neck and a sweet little coaxing voice whispers to you, “Let me go there, my darling papa.”  Hang it, one is not made of wood, after all!