Woman, however, may be as cold as ice, feel chilly shivers of aversion and loathing run through her entire body, hate a man to the desire of death, despise to abhorrence a man who is near to her; and yet in many cases she can, and in very many she must, submit to his caress. Frigid, with grief in her heart and hatred on her lips, she beholds the ardor of that man which burns but does not warm her; she looks on the sublimity of enthusiasm only as the culmination of ridicule; she discerns passion, but finds it simply grotesque; she perceives impetuosity, and for her it is nothing but violence; instead of love, with its flashes, its light, its perfumes, she sees, smells, touches simply a brutal force which debases, prostitutes, pollutes her; an infinity of repugnance in an ocean of nausea! When woman has fallen into that mire through her own fault, she cannot be more cruelly punished. The immensity of prostitution is avenged with an infinity of outrage; the holiest thing is plunged into the most fetid mud; the greatest joy gives place to the greatest shame. But when, on the contrary, the daughter of Eve is brought to this sacrifice of the body by the tyranny of the law, by the perverted tendencies of our moral education, when she finds herself led to that cruel misfortune through ignorance or through the fault of others,--then, if she does not yet possess that skepticism which heals the heart or that cynicism which shields it, if she still knows what modesty is, if she still remembers the trepidations of love, then that poor woman drinks drop by drop the most cruel torture that any creature can endure; then she passes through a long and merciless agony. To have dreamed for years and years of the promised land of love, to have conquered it, inch by inch, through the reveries of childhood and the rosy aurora of adolescence; to have felt an immense, horrible fear of dying before having loved; to have loved and to love, to be aware of a volcano in the heart, to be at the gates of paradise and inhale through the portal its inebriating perfumes--and then, after all this, to become conscious of having been transformed into a vessel which satisfies the thirst, to feel in the bosom a roaring beast--to be a part of the régime of a man, like magnesia or leeches--truly this is more cruel torture than the inquisitors ever invented; it is really too great a sorrow for a lonely weak creature!