I stop here, and purposely abstain from speaking of the prostitution of Europe. We know too well that it has always been very flourishing, as well in ancient Rome as in the Middle Ages, although they were so catholic. In old France it established itself boldly, in full daylight, to such a degree that some towns, that of Rouen for example, had their _proxénètes jurés_, wearing bronze medals with the arms of the town on them.[464] As for contemporary prostitution, it is superfluous to call attention to the fact that it is one of our great social diseases. To sum up, the origin of prostitution goes back to the most primitive societies; it is anterior to all the forms of marriage, and it has persisted down to our own day in every country, and whatever might be the race, religion, form of government, or conjugal _régime_ prevailing. Taken by itself, it would suffice to prove that monogamy is a type of marriage to which mankind has found it very difficult to bend itself; the very general existence of the concubinate completes the demonstration. III. _Various Forms of Concubinage._ Between animal love, that can be tasted with the prostitute, and the noblest monogamic union, there is a wide space, which the concubinate has filled. Legal concubinage or the concubinate, admitted and practised, as we shall see, in so many countries, is a sort of free marriage, tolerated by custom, recognised by law, and co-existing by the side of monogamic marriage, the rigour of which it palliates. It was at first a blending of polygamy with monogamy, and then, undergoing itself an evolution analogous to that which has caused the adoption by degrees of legal monogamy among nearly all civilised peoples, it ended by becoming in its turn monogamic in ancient Rome. I will briefly retrace its ethnographical history. In its primitive phase, still very confused, the concubinate has been simply the conjugal appropriation of slaves, especially of women captured after a victory. These were part of the rights of the victor; the captives were considered as booty, and shared in the same way. We have already seen in Deuteronomy that Moses authorises this barbarous practice, and that it was habitual also among the primitive Arabs. The Homeric warriors did the same, as various passages of the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ prove. I will quote a few of them. To begin with, we find the old priest Chryses comes to offer Agamemnon a rich ransom for his daughter, and receives from the king of kings the brutal reply--“I will not set your daughter free: old age shall find her in my dwelling at Argos, far from her native land, weaving linen and sharing my bed. Go, then, and provoke me not.”[465]