’Mary, despite the humble air affected by her, is a deal too haughty for me.  It is as much as her foot does, swathed in its white coverings, if it just touches the earth, now purpling where the old serpent writhes.  Her eyes are the loveliest eyes in the world; but they are always turned heavenwards, or else they are cast down.  They never look you straight in the face.  They have never served as the mirror of a human form....  Venus comes, from the sea to take possession of the world, as a goddess who loves men should—­quite naked and quite alone.  Earth is more to her liking than is Olympus, and amongst her lovers she has more men than gods.  She drapes herself in no faint veils of mystery.  She stands straight upright, her dolphin behind her, and her foot upon her opal-coloured shell.  The sun strikes full upon her smooth limbs, and her white hand holds in air the waves of her fair locks, which old father Ocean has sprinkled with his most perfect pearls.  One can see her.  She hides nothing; for modesty was only made for those who have no beauty.  It is an invention of the modern world; the child of the Christian contempt for form and matter.

’Oh ancient world! all that you held in reverence is held in scorn by us.  Thine idols are overthrown in the dust; fleshless anchorites clad in rags and tatters, martyrs with the blood fresh on them, and their shoulders torn by the tigers of thy circuses, have perched themselves on the pedestals of thy fair desirable gods.  The Christ has enveloped the whole world in his winding-sheet....  Oh purity, plant of bitterness, born on a blood-soaked soil, and whose degenerate and sickly blossom expands with difficulty in the dank shade of cloisters, under a chill baptismal rain; rose without scent, and spiked all round with thorns, thou hast taken the place for us of the glad and gracious roses, bathed with nard and wine, of the dancing girls of Sybaris!

’The ancient world knew thee not, oh sterile flower! thou wast never enwoven in its chaplets of delirious perfume.  In that vigorous and healthy society they would have spurned thee under foot disdainfully.  Purity, mysticism, melancholy—­three words unknown to thee, three new maladies brought into our life by the Christ!...  For me, I look on woman in the old world manner, like a fair slave, made only for our pleasures.  Christianity, in my eyes, has done nothing to rehabilitate her....  To say the truth, I cannot conceive for what reason there should be this desire in woman to be looked on as on a level with men....  I have made some love-verses in my time, or at least something that aspired to pass for such ... and there is not a vestige in them of the modern feeling of love....  There is nothing there, as in all the love-poetry since the Christian era, of a soul which, because it loves, begs another soul to love it back again; nothing there of a blue and shining lake, which begs a stream to pour itself into its bosom, that both together they may mirror the stars of heaven; nothing there of a pair of ring-doves, opening their wings together, that they may both together fly to the same nest.’[16]