"Think of it. Here is a man who possesses the most beautiful woman in the world; he is young and ardent; he finds her beautiful and tells her so; she replies that she loves him. Some one touches him on the shoulder and says to him 'She is unfaithful.' Nothing more, he is sure of himself. If some one had said: 'She is a poisoner,' he would, perhaps, have continued to love her, he would not have given her a kiss less; but she is unfaithful and it is no more a question of love with him than of the star of Saturn. "What is there in that word? A word that is merited, positive, withering, it is agreed. But why? It is still but a word. Can you kill a body with a word? "And if you love that body? Some one pours a glass of wine and says to you: 'Do not love that, for you can get four for six francs.' And if you become intoxicated? "But that Desgenais loves his mistress, since he keeps her; he must, therefore, have a peculiar fashion of loving? No, he has not; his fashion of loving is not love, and he cares no more for the woman who merits affection than for her who is unworthy. He loves no one, simply and truly. "What has led him to that? Was he born thus? To love is as natural as to eat and to drink. He is not a man. Is he a dwarf or a giant? What! always that impassive body? Upon what does he feed, what brew does he drink? Behold him at thirty as old as the senile Mithridates; the poisons of vipers are his familiar friends. "There is the great secret, my child, the key to which you must seize. By whatever process of reasoning debauchery may be defended, it will be proven that it is natural at a given day, hour or evening, but not to-morrow nor every day. There is not a people on earth which has not considered woman either the companion and consolation of man or the sacred instrument of life, and has not under these two forms honored her. And yet here is an armed warrior who leaps into the abyss that God has dug with his own hands between man and brute; as well might he deny the fact. What mute Titian is this who dares repress under the kisses of the body the love of the thought, and place on human lips the stigma of the brute, the seal of eternal silence? "There is a word that should be studied. There breathes under the wind of those dismal forests that are called secrets of the body, one of those mysteries that the angels of destruction whisper in the ear of night as it descends upon the earth. That man is better or worse than God has made him. His bowels are like those of sterile women, where nature has not completed her work, or there is distilled in the shadow some venomous poison.