By the side of this in importance in society is placed that of the _avowed kept women_ (_femmes lancées_), who are sought after like a race-horse or dog of high breed—a numerous family which daily reckons new varieties. Here still the original cause of the evil lies in the want of independence for the woman, who, after having been supported by a father or a brother, is reduced, in the absence of such props, to have recourse to a lover. When this fragile reed comes to be broken, she remains at the mercy of the first comer who gives her the means of livelihood. The impossibility of getting a competence and distinction in the liberal professions plunges into this gulf even women like the exhibitioners of St. Denis; in the same way certain young women of the working classes have connected themselves with manufacturers, famous bankers, wealthy public officials, who, living on family property or pension, give up to them the ten, twenty, or thirty thousand francs lopped from our budget; these goddesses in the hey-day of their spring-time are floating on the surface of perdition. The short-lived favours of their prostituters have stifled their natural qualities; they show themselves very proud of mortgagee lovers, while rejecting mortgager ones; but all despicable as they seem, they are far from being so much so as their supporters, who, possessing a competency, wealth, social appointments, and honours, sacrifice the most sacred duties to their passion for degrading gratifications. The woman trampled on by these attachments of a day is often she who knows how to cherish and preserve constancy in love, she, in short, who might possibly have become a faithful spouse and tender mother; while the harlot at the zenith of her avocation is she who can stoop to the degree of the corruption of her purchasers. The luxuriousness, the sensation, the independence, the very borrowed honour which, in the present day, encircles the name of a certain mistress of an exalted personage, the remembrancers which the public compete for at the sale of her effects, are the saddest indications of our decay. Formerly, prostitution, which had no name in respectable language, was confined to particular streets with a stigma of infamy which forbade its breathing the common air; in our time it gives the tinge of hope to its peculiar type admitted into good society; if there still exist accursed abodes where human beings are shut up like lepers, they belong to the hives of the working classes which are tasked to the utmost to create wonders. Who does not recall the economist Blanqui’s heartrending stories of the streets of Lille, those catacombs of people having no property? Who does not remember those of the “_Bassesse_” and of the “_Cloaque_” at Rouen, where families of working-men, deprived of air and space, seemed buried alive in their underground dwellings?