A woman, on the contrary, after forty-five, or at the most after fifty years of age, is no longer a woman, and the reproductive faculty is entirely destroyed. Hence the marriage of a young man and old woman is more contrary to the laws of nature than that of an old man and a young woman. The one may be fruitful, the other never. Add to the æsthetic exigencies of the man the rapid decadence of the woman after the change of life, and you will understand that the union we are discussing is one of the most repugnant and repulsive. The motives which bring such a man and such a woman together are nearly always the most abject, and amongst those that offend the moral sense the most. On one side carnal gratification; on the other the thirst for gold; hence, prostitution on the part of the man, the most filthy and disgusting in the commerce of love. The man sells his youth, his virility, in exchange for money; and the woman who no longer has a right to love, buys it as a merchandise, and is satisfied with the voluptuousness given her by one whom she ought to be the first to despise! A market of lasciviousness and vileness, gold gathered from the mud—a mud, however, which cannot be washed off, and which soils hand, conscience, everything it touches. However, for the honour of humanity, such unions are exceedingly rare: those who buy and sell and are satisfied with a clandestine concubinage, hide the sin in the deep folds of our modern hypocrisy. _Maintained, yes; a husband, no!_ A woman, on the contrary, always desires marriage, because she has the pride of proclaiming to all the world, that, notwithstanding her many years and innumerable wrinkles, the wreck of her form which assails her on all sides, she has known how to find a companion at bed and board, who makes her happy. Man, on the contrary, hides himself on account of the modesty which is never wanting, even in the vilest delinquents; and hiding his shame in the darkness of a clandestine concubinage, hopes to preserve the esteem of men, and the gold he has gained with that reddened face of his. I will persist no longer on this theme because I hope that no young husbands of old women will ever read my book—they would soil it too much with their filthy hands—and because I have a great hope that they are all illiterate. ⁂ However, before leaving this lurid argument, I ought to say, for the love of truth, that ancient and modern history register some exceedingly rare cases of union between old women and young men, in which neither the desires of the flesh nor the thirst for gold entered at all; they treat of intellectual unions in which the concord of souls, the sympathy of hearts and thoughts, the harmony of taste, the affinity of humane propositions, most charmingly unite two persons whom the difference in age would generally divide.