O you, real eunuchs, half-eunuchs, quarter-eunuchs, do not hope to be loved by a woman on whom you have imposed an infamous contract! No virtue, no oath can resist the sacred laws of love; nobody is stronger than nature. And if you have found a heroine, why make a martyr of her? Do you want to be the executioner of her whom you say you love? And you, generous women, noble women, who can elevate to the highest regions even the lowest passion, do not accept any compact involving a mutilation of love. You, teachers of every kind of sacrifice, you think that you will make happy an outcast of nature, you impose upon yourselves, smiling perhaps, the sublime mission of redeeming a desperate man: but I assure you that neither virtue nor sacrifice nor heroism can stifle that formidable cry of the universe of the living that wants you to be wives and mothers. While the martyr, with the palm of sacrifice tightly pressed to her bosom, will try to smile, a cruel, deep, painful stab in her heart will warn her: "You, Eve and daughter of Eve, will become a mother only through a crime, will enter the sanctuary of sanctuaries, the tabernacle of maternity, only through the door of domestic treason." No; love is not all senses and all lust. Sentiment can be such a great part of it as to conceal voluptuousness in the most secluded recess of a hidden region. No; woman can be happy even without voluptuousness if she only feels herself loved: but she wishes to love, and should love, "a man." I appeal to all the daughters of Eve, and, to be spared blushing, they may reply with a nod of the head and without moving their lips: Is it not true that you would prefer a hundred times to be loved by a "real man," even with a vow of chastity, rather than to be profaned and satiated with lust at the hands of a eunuch? Is it not true that above all you want to have for support that firm column called "an honorable man"? And certainly he is not an honorable man who claims the possession of a woman and demands to be loved by her when he is not a man. The half-men who at forty, at fifty years of age aspire to have a family, after having dragged their half-virility through the lasciviousness of prostitution and the dainties of the erotic kitchen, should never suppose that lechery can take the place of true love in a woman. They can prostitute their spouse, but they can never make her love them earnestly and deeply. They are foredoomed by the inexorable laws of nature to figure largely in the population of cuckoldom.