in order to save a multitude of families, women and honest girls, found itself compelled to grant to certain licensed hearts the right of satisfying the desire of the celibates; ought not our laws then to raise up a professional body consisting of female Decii who devote themselves for the republic, and make a rampart of their bodies round the honest families?  The legislators have been very wrong hitherto in disdaining to regulate the lot of courtesans.

                                XXIII. 
        The courtesan is an institution if she is a necessity.

This question bristles with so many ifs and buts that we will bequeath it for solution to our descendants; it is right that we shall leave them something to do.  Moreover, its discussion is not germane to this work; for in this, more than in any other age, there is a great outburst of sensibility; at no other epoch have there been so many rules of conduct, because never before has it been so completely accepted that pleasure comes from the heart.  Now, what man of sentiment is there, what celibate is there, who, in the presence of four hundred thousand young and pretty women arrayed in the splendors of fortune and the graces of wit, rich in treasures of coquetry, and lavish in the dispensing of happiness, would wish to go—?  For shame!

Let us put forth for the benefit of our future legislature in clear and brief axioms the result arrived at during the last few years.

XXIV. 
In the social order, inevitable abuses are laws of nature, in
accordance with which mankind should frame their civil and political
institutes.

XXV. 

“Adultery is like a commercial failure, with this difference,” says Chamfort, “that it is the innocent party who has been ruined and who bears the disgrace.”

In France the laws that relate to adultery and those that relate to bankruptcy require great modifications.  Are they too indulgent?  Do they sin on the score of bad principles? Caveant consules!

Come now, courageous athlete, who have taken as your task that which is expressed in the little apostrophe which our first Meditation addresses to people who have the charge of a wife, what are you going to say about it?  We hope that this rapid review of the question does not make you tremble, that you are not one of those men whose nervous fluid congeals at the sight of a precipice or a boa constrictor!  Well! my friend, he who owns soil has war and toil.  The men who want your gold are more numerous than those who want your wife.

After all, husbands are free to take these trifles for arithmetical estimates, or arithmetical estimates for trifles.  The illusions of life are the best things in life; that which is most respectable in life is our futile credulity.  Do there not exist many people whose principles are merely prejudices, and who not having the force of character to form their own ideas of happiness and virtue accept what is ready made for them by the hand of legislators?  Nor do we address those Manfreds who having taken off too many garments wish to raise all the curtains, that is, in moments when they are tortured by a sort of moral spleen.  By them, however, the question is boldly stated and we know the extent of the evil.