One class of these new-comers are of no particular country. They come from everywhere--from South America as well as from the banks of the Nile; from the Gulf of Mexico as well as from the far East; and the sore that eats into our very marrow is owing to the enthusiastic welcome Paris gives to their high-sounding names and suspicious fortunes. Lacking all the good points of the Southerners, whose faults usually spring from exuberant vigor and fancifulness, these foreigners take Paris for a kind of modern Capua. They are the dealers in commonplace, the readers of obscene works, the originators of every debauchery. The result is seen in voice and gesture, in a freedom of bearing and a frivolity which, in great part, are the cause of our social fall, and, as a consequence, of the success achieved by erotic books, written in a language scarcely intelligible, and by unhealthy volumes which, stinking at one and the same time of the sewer and of opoponax, might have been printed at Lesbos. Now, as I have no ambition to write one of these books, I will only say what is needful to make myself understood of the passion which had brought Lise Olsdorf and Paul Meyrin together. What I wish to sketch is the moral depths into which a woman quickly sinks when, yielding to her animal desires alone, she throws herself blindly and recklessly into the arms of a man who is of neither her world, race, nor education. Love, in the pure acceptation of the word, even when it is not legitimate, must occasion an exchange of lofty sentiments, sacrifices, and devotion between those who feel it for one another. It outlives all trials; in the pride of its abnegation it will provoke them on occasion. Passion, on the contrary, when the soul is a stranger to it, is made up of egotism and material gratifications. In such a case, in the hands of a man who knows he is more desired than loved, the woman is no longer an adorable companion in life who encourages and consoles, a faithful friend whose joy doubles our joys. She becomes an instrument of pleasure, whose jealous owner would have not only all her moments of _abandon_, but all her smiles and her most trifling thoughts. She must live for him alone, please him only, be beautiful before him alone. Destroying the aspirations of the woman who has thus rashly given herself up to him, her master soon makes of her a slave, whose heart, stifled by its surroundings, ere long ceases to beat. And when the day of satiety and _abandon_ comes, there remains of the ideal creature of God nothing but a worthless woman, soiled in her own eyes, and fated thenceforward to lead a life of weariness and disgust.