the life of French villages.  But the ways of a Russian village, where I passed part of my childhood, fairly resemble those described by Zola.  In the life of the rural population into which I was plunged everything was impregnated with erotism.  One was surrounded by animal lubricity in all its immodesty.  Contrary to the generally received opinion, I believe that a child may preserve his sexual innocence more easily in a town than in the country.  There are, no doubt, many exceptions to this rule.  But the functions of the sexual life are generally more concealed in the towns than in the fields.  Modesty (whether or not of the merely superficial and exterior kind) is more developed among urban populations.  In speaking of sexual things in the towns people veil their thought more; even the lower class in towns employ more restraint, more euphemisms, than peasants.  Thus in the towns a child may easily fail to comprehend when risky subjects are talked of in his presence.  It may be said that the corruption of towns, though more concealed, is all the deeper.  Maybe, but that concealment preserves children from it.  The town child sees prostitutes in the street every day without distinguishing them from other people.  In the country he would every day hear it stated in the crudest terms that such and such a girl has been found at night in a barn or a ditch making love with such and such a youth, or that the servant girl slips every night into the coachman’s bed, the facts of sexual intercourse, pregnancy, and childbirth being spoken of in the plainest terms.  In towns the child’s attention is solicited by a thousand different objects; in the country, except fieldwork, which fails to interest him, he hears only of the reproduction of animals and the erotic exploits of girls and youths.  When we say that the urban environment is more exciting we are thinking of adults, but the things which excite the adult have usually no erotic effect on the child, who cannot, however, long remain asexual when he sees the great peasant girls, as ardent as mares in heat, abandoning themselves to the arms of robust youths.  He cannot fail to remark these frank manifestations of sexuality, though the subtle and perverse refinements of the town would escape his notice.  I know that in the countries of exaggerated prudery there is much hidden corruption, more, one is sometimes inclined to think, than in less hypocritical countries.  But I believe that that is a false impression, and am persuaded that precisely because of all these little concealments which excite the malicious amusement of foreigners, there are really many more young people in England who remain chaste than in the countries which treat sexual relations more frankly.  At all events, if I have known Englishmen who were very debauched and very refined in vice, I have also known young men of the same nation, over twenty, who were as innocent as children, but never a young Frenchman, Italian, or Spaniard of whom this could be said.”