In all classes we meet these men, whose polygamy, simultaneous or successive, has no other limits than the caprices of unbridled passion. This process of making licentiousness common, imparts to it, in the present day, an instability unknown even to the corruption of the 18th century, in which the courtesan was, so far as the aristocracy and the rich among the middle classes were concerned, a woman of inferior rank, with an assured _status_, like that of the legitimate wife; in practice, our dissipated men, rich and poor, allow their _mistresses of a day_ to pass through every successive step in degradation. Such and such a youth writes down among the records of his life, the possession of a girl whom he was able to pay for three months or three days when he left college. Thus the debauchee, not rich enough to keep a mistress, obtains unlawful gratification on a species of five-percent. principle; it is the fact of the existence of these morals that gave occasion to the writing of this:— “Impuissants a porter un vice tout entier Ils sont amants, joueurs, libertins par quartier.”[35] But, in order to appreciate better an evil which is sapping society in its very foundations, let us especially consider those who symbolize truth, justice, law and national defence; that is to say, the student, the public official, and the soldier—the soldier who, previously enlisted to defend his country, seems to be no longer kept in pay but in order to corrupt her. The young man’s course of depravity begins at college; the pestiferous atmosphere in which we are living causes bad books to find their way into our schools, where children are often detected reading the memoirs of our dancing and singing celebrities, to get acquainted with the details of their lives and that of their illustrious lovers; the greater part of them conceive the hope of following their elders in backstairs society, and their young imagination places its beau-ideal in the wealth acquired by corruption and for corruption. The sayings of young men have been collected, of whom one claimed that the unlimited use of the horse, the cigar, and the mistress, should follow upon a course of philosophy; whilst another affirmed that it might be substituted for it with advantage. In fact, we have rhetoricians who fight duels on account of harlots. It is this type of libertine which affects a supreme contempt for modest women, rejects the advice of his elder sisters, the wise counsel of his mother, and would fear to be ridiculed among his fellow-students for his respectful conduct towards her. The manners of some of them are such that they glory in smoking in a carriage, in the presence of women, who seem to them too timid to remind them of the bye-laws.