And all of you, jurors of feminine honesty, who with so much assurance and brutality pass your judgment upon hearts and virginity, have you ever thought of the thousand and one aggressions which a young, beautiful and courted woman must pass through, and that, before becoming a bride, she must struggle with her own ignorance and others' lechery, with the surprises of the senses and with the cunning artifices of lust? A moment of weakness, an instant of morbid curiosity, may dim but not stain the virtue of a woman who can be, before and after, as pure as rock-crystal. No; virginity is a great thing, it is the largest diamond in the crown of youthful virtue; but it is not all the woman, it is not all the virtue. How many wretched women were never pure except in the maternal womb, and yet with studied lasciviousness and infinite art preserved intact the physical seal of virtue, through the lechery of a hundred lovers, and, full of profound wisdom and prudent libertinage and weary of carnal lust, carried their virginity to the altar of the official first love! Beautiful treasure, indeed! A diamond fallen a hundred times into the mud and a hundred times picked up and washed! Beautiful gem! A piece of flesh preserved pure in a prostituted body; a flower grown on a clod of earth in the midst of a fetid marsh! And men often picked that flower with sacred devotion and kissed it and adored it, perhaps after having hurled an insult at the pure and virtuous girl who lacked only a seal, like a registered letter refused by the post-office clerk because it lacked a drop of sealing-wax. How often have I wept in wrath, listening to mothers teaching their daughters this one dogma of virtue: "Preserve physical virginity!" How often have I cursed modern morals which teach the bride: "Above all, no scandal!" These, then, are the morals of this hypocritical century: "Virgin first, prudent afterward." There is the virtue of woman! An eye on the seal first, an eye to the keyhole later on: such is the perfect woman of our times! The excessive, brutal and bestial importance given to virginity by modern society has created the infamous art of manufacturing virgins; and many times virginity has had two, five, ten different editions, not all improved, but always correct and revised, while the idiotic mass of husbands and lovers have been tricked into applauding the new virtue, the purest virtue, heaven knows how acquired! The debasement of this hypocritical time could not be more cynically avenged. Of the virtue of a woman you have an idea utterly physical and chemical. Now, this advanced civilization is all at your service; it manufactures a chemical and physical virginity for your convenience, and calls to its aid some acrobatism, hocus-pocus and natural magic. _Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur._ Curse, then, the pure and holy woman whose heart is virgin, who never has loved, but to whom the Longobards could never have awarded the prize of the _morgincap_!