Part 4

The sayings of young men have been collected, of whom one claimed that the unlimited use of the horse, the cigar, and the mistress, should follow upon a course of philosophy; whilst another affirmed that it might be substituted for it with advantage. In fact, we have rhetoricians who fight duels on account of harlots. It is this type of libertine which affects a supreme contempt for modest women, rejects the advice of his elder sisters, the wise counsel of his mother, and would fear to be ridiculed among his fellow-students for his respectful conduct towards her. The manners of some of them are such that they glory in smoking in a carriage, in the presence of women, who seem to them too timid to remind them of the bye-laws.

Religion and the family oppose but a feeble obstacle to the profligacy of youths during the period of secondary instruction; but in that of the higher grade, the young man shaking off this uncomfortable check, inaugurates his life as a citizen by procuring a degraded mistress, who initiates him into every sort of wickedness.[36]

The student away from home often lives in those social circles which are the most corrupting. It is incredible to what extent the guests at these social gatherings dread the company of respectable people. They give themselves out as ‘_bored_’ if they have to make their appearance at a _family_ dinner, try to escape from a ball in good society, shun a drawing-room where they must observe some proprieties of behaviour, and curse every atmosphere which keeps them away from their cigar, their beer, the racket of the billiard-table, the public-house and the orgie where their nights are spent. Far from being ashamed of this kind of life, they have, as we can testify, the impudence to appear in our law courts as complainants, if the women with whom they are cohabiting rob them of a few francs. Students of law, medicine, &c., often picked up drunk in the streets, at two and three o’clock in the morning, are brought up for creating a disturbance at night. “You have,” the judge tells them, “ill-used women with whom you are cohabiting; but the fact of notorious profligacy is not an object of legal repression or even of censure.” A law student twice attempted to stab with a poinard one of his rivals who was seated at a table of the _Eldorado café_. The prosecution proved that this assassin had for four years been living with prostitutes in the most unrestrained debauchery.[37] By an odd coincidence, the newspapers were giving a report of this degradation of a young man entrusted to our society, by an honourable family, for the sake of his education, viz., for the elevation of his mind and heart, on the very day that the Senate, after having approved of the irresponsibility of public officials, was adding a peroration to an address, to celebrate the principles of _loyalty and morality_ in which we are bringing up the young. Let us look a little more closely at the language of facts, and we shall understand the unhappiness of parents compelled to have their sons brought up amidst circumstances in which the principles of _loyalty and morality_ may be trampled under foot with a cynicism of this character. There is no longer such a thing as youth, some one exclaims with sadness, in taking notice of morals of this description. There is no longer a fatherland, one might rejoin. Are the domestic virtues, then, no longer the school for civil ones? If any guardianship, or disciplinary regimen, is exercised over students, apart from acts which do not fall within the penal law, is it logical to make them out to be so rigorous in discourses read to foreigners while shutting our eyes to the crimes I am enumerating? Should not tutors that have charge of the heart, from the time they stand in place of the absent family, take care of and be anxious about the morality and higher nature of these youths, who are the advance-guard of the future, and have been confided by France to their care? And yet this corruption, all odious though it be, is not to be placed by the side of the fierce selfishness of those students who, with a calculating heartlessness, seduce workwomen, artless girls who become attached to them. In order to show the connection between seduction and prostitution, I instance the following among those which abound on this melancholy subject:—

A rich foreign student, whose parents used to send him 600 to 700 francs monthly for his personal expenses, became acquainted with a young shopwoman living away from home in Paris. After keeping her for some time, he deserted her when she had told him she expected to become a mother. This woman in the most frightful poverty, reduced to bring forth her child in the street, was conveyed to the hospital. Despite the student’s unfeeling conduct to herself, she was hoping he would provide for the daughter she had given birth to; but he proceeded to take away from her her last hope, and informed her, when sending her 30 francs, that if she had the audacity to annoy him, French police and French law would very soon set all that to rights. Stunned by this last blow, the young girl never again arose from her bed of sorrow. Let us say, for the honour of human nature, that there was a general feeling of indignation among those who knew about this odious action; they did not know how to brand this selfish debauchee who imagined he could, with 30 francs, atone for the murder of a woman and the sacrifice of a child. I, however, consider he was generous, this student. The laws of his own country, sentencing him to allow the deserted child and agonised mother a means of support in proportion to his fortune, might, it is true, have imposed upon him a sufficient fine; but, as he was living under the personal advantage of a code of laws he had been wise enough to call in to his aid, as a protection for his profligacy, and as he was the sole judge of the reparation, he gave 30 francs too much. Perhaps he denied himself an orgie; he showed himself superior to a code which, to preserve the prerogatives of debauchery inviolable, does not condescend to grant the consideration to the human soul which it bestows upon broken glass. The French legislator has said to us, in effect: “_I forbid_ you to interfere with this man; he is my chosen one, my anointed, the apple of my eye; I pronounce him inviolable. Let him cause ruin, let him make victims, I applaud; it is his right, it is my principle of the education of youth.”[38]

These poor girls are also seen to commit suicide from despair. One of them threw herself out of her window on hearing of the marriage of a law student who had just deserted her. Another was seized with asphyxia in the room of the medical student who was leaving her. Have we not reason to shudder, then, in reflecting that these assassins, seated one day on the bench, will be the interpreters of the fundamental law which regulates the relations of the sexes?

In directing special attention to such monsters, let us consider youth away from home, entering life with the most generous aspirations—with the healthiest impulses with respect to individual rights and social obligations. Well, these students, not being more than about 25 to 30 years old—not having the social position which will admit of their marrying—meet with numerous obstacles in the path of honour. In their minority for lawful wedlock or for reparation, they are in their majority for error and crime. Their conscience speaks in vain; society, fashion, speak louder still, and stifle this voice. Minority, the issue at the termination of their student career, the demands of their future profession, are insuperable obstacles. Custom and prejudice superadding their barriers, give the names of heedlessness, and senseless marriage, to the fulfilment of a duty from the non-fulfilment of which an honest man would recoil. In proportion as the student lives in this deadly atmosphere, the depravity of his heart vitiating his judgment, impels him, without remorse, to sacrifice mothers and children as a holocaust to profligacy. The lower-class girl is no longer anything but the sport of his passions. It is all over with him. He proceeds from seduction to prostitution; provides himself with victims without name, by the intervention of the agents of human merchandise, the hucksters of shame; and France has lost a man. This is the history of numbers of young men fixed in our towns for years, between their duty, the abstract idea of good, and the social current of example, and the allurement of the senses. They had promised marriage to a woman they had seduced; their promise was a sincere one; they even attempted to get rid of the material obstacles which were opposing either their lawful union or the legitimation of their children. But as their promise did not receive the sanction of the law, they made themselves familiar with perjury. Time, absence, satiety made them forget their former engagements. They then, no longer as novices, but with deliberate design, made false oaths to other women, and constancy foresworn in regard to one will be so in reference to a thousand.

A celebrated novel has made the names of _Tholomyés_ and of _Marius_ familiar to many. The former personifies the student with base passions, the hero of the day, whose morals I have sketched—who becomes an important personage, a member of parliament, all the while he is continuing to be, without control, the cause of ruin to women and children. The second pictures the young student, true to a first love, which keeps alive in him noble and elevated feelings, and confers happiness on him through marriage. Men affecting to be serious, have, in this matter, accused the author of exaggeration and falsehood. It may, nevertheless, be asserted that our higher course of instruction reckons, among those who are its objects, many more of the _Tholomyés_ than the _Marius_ type, and that it is even organised in a way to nourish these profligate men. Who does not know that on the appearance of the _Misérables_ our _Tholomyés_ of the _quartier latin_ were making sport of their mistresses by styling them _Fautine_?

If we wish to leave the domain of fiction, let a careful inquiry be made into the number of young men away from home in our towns without becoming depraved in them; let this investigation be made among the fifteen and twenty thousand students living in Paris, far from their families, and let us be informed how many _Tholomyés_ seduce _Fautines_, and how many _Mariuses_ marry, or can marry, their sweethearts. For myself, I am endeavouring to base my assertions upon conscientious investigation: I have questioned many families having relations with students who are recommended to them from the provincial towns. All have assured me, sadly, that they have not been able to save _one_ of them from vice. A respectable woman, among others, after keeping in view twenty young men, had seen some who had remained one year, others two or three years, without contracting vicious habits; but all of them, before their departure from Paris, had finished by, more or less, losing their innocence in the fumes of excess, and were giving themselves up to those debasing pleasures, which, by corrupting the individual, destroy all social-ties. It is young men like these who, baptised in luxuriousness, make, as it were, a distinctive livery of it; for the rest, it is not a question of knowing if good or evil is the exception here, but of demonstrating all the odiousness there is in the impunity of a possible vice while the student is being initiated into the duties of the citizen.

In the face of the actual state of things, let us no longer ask why our system of advanced training produces so few superior men, and let us deplore the mistake of the instructors of youth, who do not pay sufficient attention to moral culture—to the elevation and dignity of the feelings of man—to the enquiry whether the youth entrusted to their care has not been guilty of any of these stolen-marches upon justice which confuse the harmonious relations indispensable to the maintenance of all social order. For ourselves, conscious of the worth of a human soul, we weep over the unhappiness of France, which, year by year, is losing its vigour. I shall have to speak of the antagonism in society which results from male irresponsibleness. Let us follow, for a moment, those young men prepared for filling the part of public officials by acts of violence against the institution of the family, and which would deprive them of the rights of citizenship in a state of society sufficiently logical to regulate its morals by its principles.

It is among these that we meet with those selfish and avaricious men who, having a host of ruinous wants, contract mercenary marriages. It is in their ranks that we include those intending husbands, dragged into marriage by their families, and by certain conveniences of position, which impose it upon them as a means of purgation; they have had pointed out to them a young lady disposed to place in their power a large fortune, attractions of person and heart by relatives who must decide about them. The marriage is, nevertheless, arranged without their being consulted; everything around them is going forward for the nuptials; nothing is wanting but their affection. Eventually the marriage takes place; they make as few and short calls as possible; in the midst of the heartiness of their family connexions, they alone remain abstracted, bored, awkward and unpolite, absorbed as they are in regrets for the seduction of the lower-class girl for which they had not to answer, and for the courtesan’s drawing-room. Restrained for a very short time by the life of the domestic circle, they are ill at ease while kept at a distance from their ideal, all the while looking forward to be released on the very first opportunity.[39]

To get at the origin of these immoralities, so widely spread in the present day, we must put royalty itself upon the culprit’s stool, and exhibit it on the scaffold where it expiated the guilty inconsistency which made it defy those moral laws, the observance of which was its most sacred title to the veneration of subjects. When the dynasty of the Mérovingians was implanted in our soil, a conquest to Rome, civilization, and Christianity, the Gallican bishops, it is true, made the haughty Sicambrians bow their heads to regenerate them in the water of baptism. But these men of the sword and blood did not leave all their pollutions there, because their moral sense was not sufficiently developed to understand the purity of practice, the holiness of the Christian teaching. The Church tolerated in these barbarous kings and their enervated sons, the Roman system of concubinage which, be it observed, by determining the lot of the woman and the child, guarded against the crimes resulting from irresponsible profligacy.

Nevertheless, absolute power would have brought its customary abuses in its train if, in the Church, it had not found a moderator invested with the noble mission of giving a sanction to justice by making the principle of marriage triumph for the protection of the weak against the brutal caprices of the strong; history ought to bless those pontifical fulminations which hovered constantly over the head of royal culprits from the moment they had taken their passions as their rule of conduct.[40]

But restraint irritated these kings, these princes and great ones, senseless enough not to understand that they were ruining themselves, together with respect for authority, by teaching the people contempt for the moral law. The age of the “Renaissance” was, from this point of view, perhaps the most fatal era of our old monarchy. Paganism, when it left Constantinople, proceeded to take possession of the papacy, and, being infiltrated into all the pores of our society, dominated in literature, art and morals. In the “saturnalia” of debauchery, Rome lost her empire over the souls of men; the Reformation carrying with it the principle of vitality, substituted the authority of conscience for that of divine right; but France, corrupted to the extent of having abbots like Brantôme, had not recuperative force sufficient to regenerate her morals, and, pagan in her customs, she was yet illogical enough to believe she was Christian and profess herself Catholic. Her kings, putting themselves out of the page—that is, ceasing to be guided by common sense or reason, wallowed with impunity in the most monstrous debauchery. Sending to execution those who reproved them,[41] they paid honour to their _morganatic queens_ (queen-mistresses). From this period, moreover, every principle of respect was destroyed by these great violators of the social compact, henceforward in no fear from judges; it is in this way that France experienced the humiliation of sullying her history by the disgraces of the court during the dynasty of the Valois, and by the scandals and infamies of that of the Bourbons.

The example afforded by royalty having roused the courtiers and nobles to emulate it, they vied with each other in deserting their duty of making their estates productive and enlightening their vassals. Wholly taken up in the gratification of their selfish passions, they gradually lost their long kept honour in the ostentatious idleness of Versailles, and communicated their corruption, more and more closely, to the rich of the middle class. Still, however, the law, which was no longer anything but a dead-letter for royalty and the aristocracy, continuing to exercise authority over the masses, the condition of morals at the close of the 18th century may be thus summed up: the nobles paraded their mistresses, the middle class concealed them, the lower orders coveted them. But peace to these _Manes_, since rivers of blood have cleansed these _Augean_ stables.[42]

It is not useless to compare this period of decline with our present morals. _Then the debauchee infringed the laws—he keeps them now_; the corruption which was at the head of the nation has affected its heart; _the privilege of the few has become the right of all_.

“Obscur, on l’eût flétri d’une mort légitime, Il est puissant, les lois out ignoré son crime:”[43]

was then the poet’s indignant protest. In the present day, the highest functionary prostitutes himself with prerogatives as princely as those of the Duke of Orleans. There is even no longer any magisterial authority for exercising a wholesome restraint, in this direction, upon _the governing class_.

Every debauchee is an absolute sovereign, not after the manner of our former monarchs who robbed God through his representatives, but like the Tiberiuses and the Neros, whose only law was their own passions.

The scandals of the uncontrolled conduct of certain officials set at defiance all sense of rectitude and indignant feeling. The blows they deal at the rights of the family are so public, so deplorable, and so numerous, that the State might be thought partial to debauchees if we did not know in what an atmosphere the greater part of the men entrusted with high-office for the purpose of directing us are prepared for their work, if we did not especially note their emulation in, and boasting of, the lax morals which obtain among the upper classes.

If I specified a few of these offences, our law for libel would consider me guilty—to such a degree does it pay respect to immorality. Let us merely say that no government whose aim might be the destruction of the institution of the family could find either better servants or a better state of affairs by which to accomplish its ends than that of France.

Let us speak at least of one of these men whose morals are no longer under the protection of the law.—Reynaud who, in 1861, came up before the Isire Assize Court[44] under the law for the prevention of assassination, was a former public official, that is to say, _a guardian of religion, the family, and propriety_; he had even been foreman of the jury in this court some years previously. As the proceedings at the trial proved, the successive registry-receivers in that district were causing scandal and demoralising it by their illicit intimacies. Reynaud, the murderer of his daughter in a fit of jealous anger against the Registrar, whose mistress she was, was convicted of having committed every kind of outrage upon the family institution. A husband and father, he incessantly solicited his female domestics, day labourers, and the farmers’ daughters &c., on his estates, never letting them alone; he forced them by threats of killing those who were proof against his terrifying intimidations, to the extent that several women lost their health through fear. A farmer gave evidence at the trial that, in one year, three poor servants had been obliged to submit to the monstrous desires of Reynaud, and that others, in a more independent position, had saved themselves from it by flight. A friend of his daughter, overcome by him, was also obliged to yield to solicitations which, in the defence, were toned down into partial violence. Reynaud had, moreover, seduced an idiot, and cruelly left her in great destitution while she was pregnant; he drove her away with blows with a stick when she came with her mother to ask him for some assistance for the child. This ex-official, who understood the law as applicable to his own case, even boasted at the trial of having bought as many women of the labouring classes as he wished for, by throwing them a five-franc piece as an inducement. “_That is how those things are done_,” he added sardonically, with a consciousness of his right. So far it was well, and the cup would never have been full if he had confined himself to this species of crimes, for none of the facts I have just recounted constituted the smallest delinquency, nor even the slightest responsibility in the eye of our legislation, which, at the same time, discountenances divorce as _an outrage on the family institution_. After the recital of these horrors, the President could say to the accused, “_You have been an honourable man to the verge of the criminal code._”