In this field of evil, temperament is everything; to some individuals the phrase of Linnæus concerning the loves of the cat may be applied: "_Clamando misere amat_." For these unfortunates (we have already described them) love is imbued with so much bitterness and surrounded by so many nettles that it actually resembles a bramble, all thorns and wormwood. Suspicious, fastidious, melancholy, they fear everything, scrutinize everything; they pass everything through the sieve, they pulverize everything, looking for the mite or the poison. In the kiss they suspect ice, in the caress indifference; of the impulses they feel only the shock, only the blows. And then, even that little honey that love has for all they wish to keep under watch in so many tabernacles and under so many seals that they are very fortunate when they can find and relish it! From a jealous jeremiad they fall into an hysterical soliloquy, and have hardly emerged from a gloomy meditation on the infidelity of man when they fall into the autopsy of a love-letter. These creatures were certainly born under an unlucky star, and even if nature should make them a gift of a Venus draped by the Graces, or an Apollo with the brain of Jupiter, they would still be always unhappy, because bitterness is on their lips and not in the cup of love. There is perhaps no greater torture than that which a woman must suffer when compelled to submit to the caress of a man whom she does not love. I do not mean by this the brutal violence that assimilates an embrace to homicide, and relegates it to the criminal code and the prison. In this case we would have a human beast that strikes, bites, sheds the blood of a poor creature who swoons with terror or struggles powerlessly in the clutches of a tiger: they are sorrows which belong to the story of terror, to the bloodiest pages of supreme tortures. I intend to speak here of the caresses that a woman must accord to a man because law, money or a surprise of the senses has sold her to him without love; I intend to speak of torture bitter, somber, deep as infinity, and which assimilates the prostitute to the martyr. These sorrows, among the greatest that the human heart can suffer, were by a cruel nature almost exclusively reserved for woman. Man, by the special nature of his aggressive sex, must be spurred to the embrace by a sudden enthusiasm; his senses must be clouded by intense lust. In him voluptuousness can do without love, and physical love has a joy that is sufficient to conceal mercifully all his lack of sentiment and passion. For if indifference, hatred, contempt permeate him entirely, invading even the last intrenchments of love, then no caress in the world can revive it, no law, human or divine, can force him to accept a caress which to him is repugnant. There is no case in which the ancient theory of freedom of the will shows its ridiculous falsity as plainly as in this.