The anatomical fact which constitutes virginity has, however, the great inconvenience of being understood by all, so that the mass of the people, proud and happy to be able to solve a question of virtue with the eyes and with the hands, brutally throw upon the most delicate scales of the world the sword of Brennus. Let philosophers and sentimentalists prattle at will about purity of heart and the frontiers of virtue; for the common people there are but virgin women or violated women; and physics, with its resistances of elasticity, and geometry with its diameters, solve a problem over which the minds of many thinkers were hard at work. And from this point of view, a large part of civilized men are common people, and many who weep through tenderness of heart and soar very high, stop wondering in the presence of the brutality of a fact, acknowledge defeat and empoison their own lives, thinking that the woman whom they have chosen for their companion had already sacrificed at the altar of love. Science openly affirms that virginity, even anatomically, has many varied forms, and may be lacking in women who never felt the breath of man. In my medical capacity, I have myself seen, with my own eyes, some little girls who were lacking that seal with which nature seems to consecrate the virgin; and as I contemplated the little creatures I was distressed by the thought that, though having kept virtuous and innocent, virtue would some day be unavailing for them in the presence of an ignorant and brutal man. In vain these poor girls will some day be as pure as an angel. And even when anatomy does not practise such an imposition upon a woman, a fall, a blow, a contortion may, in the most innocent way, break the fragile seal which for many is the only and secure guarantee of virtue and purity. Nor is this all. Often, in early childhood, when vice and libertinism are words unknown in the dictionary of a little girl, the lascivious jest of a too precocious boy, or the posthumous lechery of a wretched old man, may violate the palladium of anatomical virginity without dimming in the slightest degree the mirror of the heart; and later, when the mysteries of love shall be unveiled, the still chaste maiden may feel pure and proud of herself and raise her head high, not knowing that she does not possess the star of physical purity. How many domestic misfortunes have happened in this way! How many first nights of love have become infernal nights, and how many ties have been dissolved by a prejudice, a suspicion, a calumny, when they should have been a garland of the purest and most sublime joys! How many existences have been cruelly empoisoned through the elasticity of a veil more fleeting than the cloudlet that dissolves under the first rays of the sun!