the same influence still lower in the social scale.  They are describing the more squalid kind of cafe chantant, in which, in Spain and elsewhere, the most vicious and degenerate feminine creatures become waitresses (and occasionally singers and dancers), playing the part of amiable and distinguished hetairae to the public of carmen and shop-boys who frequent these resorts.  “Dressed with what seems to the youth irreproachable taste, with hair elaborately prepared, and clean face adorned with flowers or trinkets, affable and at times haughty, superior in charm and in finery to the other women he is able to know, the waitresses become the most elevated example of the femme galante whom he is able to contemplate and talk to, the courtesan of his sphere.”

But while to the simple, ignorant, and hungry youth the prostitute appeals as the embodiment of many of the refinements and perversities of civilization, on many more complex and civilized men she exerts an attraction of an almost reverse kind.  She appeals by her fresh and natural coarseness, her frank familiarity with the crudest facts of life; and so lifts them for a moment out of the withering atmosphere of artificial thought and unreal sentiment in which so many civilized persons are compelled to spend the greater part of their lives.  They feel in the words which the royal friend of a woman of this temperament is said to have used in explaining her incomprehensible influence over him:  “She is so splendidly vulgar!”

In illustration of this aspect of the appeal of prostitution, I may quote a passage in which the novelist, Hermant, in his Confession d’un Enfant d’Hier (Lettre VII), has set down the reasons which may lead the super-refined child of a cultured age, yet by no means radically or completely vicious, to find satisfaction in commerce with prostitutes:  “As long as my heart was not touched the object of my satisfaction was completely indifferent to me.  I was, moreover, a great lover of absolute liberty, which is only possible in the circle of these anonymous creatures and in their reserved dwelling.  There everything became permissible.  With other women, however low we may seek them, certain convenances must be observed, a kind of protocol.  To these one can say everything:  one is protected by incognito and assured that nothing will be divulged.  I profited by this freedom, which suited my age, but with a perverse fancy which was not characteristic of my years.  I scarcely know where I found what I said to them, for it was the opposite of my tastes, which were simple, and, if I may venture to say so, classic.  It is true that, in matters of love, unrestrained naturalism always tends to perversion, a fact that can only seem paradoxical at first sight.  Primitive peoples have many traits in common with degenerates.  It was, however, only in words that I was unbridled; and that was the only occasion on which I can recollect seriously lying.  But that necessity,