A principal magistrate of a town in France is so unfortunate as to have a wife who was debauched by a priest before her marriage, and has since brought herself to public shame; he has, however, contented himself with a private separation. This man, who is forty years old, healthy, and of a pleasing figure, has need of woman's society. He is too scrupulous to seek to seduce the wife of another; he even fears to contract an illicit intimacy with a maid or a widow. In this state of sorrow and perplexity he addresses the following complaints to the Church, of which he is a member: "My wife is criminal, and I suffer the punishment. A woman is necessary to the comfort of my life--nay, even to the preservation of my virtue; yet she is refused me by the Church, which forbids me to marry an honest woman. The civil law of the present day, which is, unhappily, founded on the canon law, deprives me of the rights of humanity. The Church compels me to seek either pleasures which it reprobates, or shameful consolations which it condemns; it forces me to be criminal. "If I look round among the nations of the earth, I see no religion except the Roman Catholic which does not recognize divorce and second marriage as a natural right. What inversion of order, then, has made it a virtue in Catholics to suffer adultery and a duty to live without wives when their wives have thus shamefully injured them? Why is a cankered tie indissoluble, notwithstanding the great maxim adopted by the code, _Quicquid ligatur dissolubile est_? A separation of person and property is granted me, but not a divorce. The law takes from me my wife, and leaves me the word _sacrament_! I no longer enjoy matrimony, but still I am married! What contradiction! What slavery! "Nor is it less strange that this law of the Church is directly contrary to the words which it believes to have been pronounced by Jesus Christ: Whosoever shall put away his wife, _except it be for fornication_, and shall marry another, committeth adultery." "I have no wish here to inquire whether the pontiffs of Rome have a right to violate at pleasure the law of Him whom they regard as their Master; whether when a kingdom wants an heir, it is allowable to repudiate the woman who is incapable of giving one; nor whether a turbulent wife, one attacked by lunacy, or one guilty of murder, should not be divorced as well as an adulteress; I confine myself to what concerns my own sad situation. God permits me to marry again, but the bishop of Rome forbids me.