Those who have not been witnesses of such events may hardly believe them. It is sufficient, however, to be a magistrate or to read the reports of lawsuits between debased persons as the result of love quarrels, broken engagements or marriages, seductions, etc., to study the letters that the two parties have written before and after their quarrel, in order to be convinced of the correctness of what we have said above. In the first letters the lovers adulate each other and adorn each other with the most hyperbolic epithets, swearing eternal love and fidelity, and deluding each other in the most absurd manner. In letters written sometimes only a few days later we are astonished to see the same individuals grossly insulting each other and mutually covering themselves with ignoble calumnies. This is how passion without reason passes through the furnaces of love and hatred, dragging after it all the artificial scaffolding of what man imagines to be his right based on logic, but which is in reality only a tissue of ridiculous contradictions, the automatic and inept product of his emotional state. Such contrasts are so frequent that we can easily recognize the expression of a psychological law, due to the mirages of the amorous passions on the one hand and the inverse reaction on the other. Nevertheless hypocrisy has its good side. It has been said not without reason that "hypocrisy is a concession which vice makes to virtue." In their nakedness human thoughts are often so sadly vulgar and so offensive that a little varnish improves them. In this sense, and when it comes from a feeling of shame or good-will, hypocrisy deserves a good deal of the eulogy which Mark Twain has heaped on it in his charming satire, "The Decadence of the Art of Lying." In the sexual question hypocrisy is directly provoked by the tyranny and barbarism of what are called good manners, often even by the law. In this sense it constitutes a response of human nature to the forms and customs derived from the right of the stronger or from religious superstitions, as well as from the dogmas resulting from them. By the term _sexual hypocrisy_ I do not mean the repugnant forms of hypocrisy pure and simple, in which man only exploits love indirectly for an interested end, for instance when he simulates love to obtain a rich wife. I only speak of the forms of hypocrisy which are directly evolved from the sexual appetite or from love.