Part 7
Then (under Henri II) Anne du Bourg thus expresses herself:—“But what! crimes worthy of death, blasphemies, adulteries, horrible debauches, perjuries are committed, with impunity, in the face of heaven, and every day new punishments are invented against men whose only crime is having made, owing to the teachings of Holy Scripture, the discovery of the Roman baseness, and having called for its wholesome reform.” The Councillor du Four, in his turn, exclaims: “We must understand well who they are that trouble the Church, lest that should happen that Elijah told king Ahab, ‘It is you who trouble Israel.’”
Footnote 42:
Saint Simon, endeavouring to have an illicit intimacy of the Duke of Orleans broken off, showed him the opinion existing against him. “There is,” said he, “a general estrangement, which has the complexion of rage, because _no one_ can endure in a grandson of France, at the age of 35, an outrage upon good morals which the magistrate and the police would long ago have punished in any one who might not have been high enough in rank to be shielded from censure.” He puts before him the distinction and honours that attach to the moral men from amongst whom Louis XIV has chosen his generals and advisers, whilst noblemen of high birth are deprived of the distinctions of their class, debased in their profligate habits, unknown or despised at court, left to their own shame and to wretchedness, expelled from the meanest societies, objects of the public blame and contempt, and reduced to find themselves too despicable for the blows people disdain to inflict upon them. Elsewhere, St. Simon further caused the reception of Villars by the parliament to be looked upon as an enormity, because, he said, “_against the most common practice_, no peer was taken as a witness of his life and manners, which will afford cause for public dissertation; had he so acted from respect or from shame, or from a fear of being rejected? I was pained,” he adds, “to find myself at so humiliating a ceremonial.”
Footnote 43:
Freely rendered thus:—
“The crime that rightly costs the hind his blood, For peers condoned, by _partial_ justice viewed,”
Footnote 44:
Sittings of March 22, 23, and 24.
Footnote 45:
Madlle. Daubié, in a private letter elsewhere, points out the terrible social results which attend the absence of laws against seducers in England, which, if joined with a system of regulated prostitution, must bring us as low as France.
Footnote 46:
Moniteur de l’armée, November, 1862.
Footnote 47:
Criminal Justice, First Court-Martial of Paris, Sittings of the 15th to the 20th April, 1857.
Footnote 48:
Second Court-Martial of Paris, October 1865.
Footnote 49:
The applications of the law which forbids the marrying a victim of seduction are sometimes grevious. Thus, an officer lost his post for making the offer of reparation to a young girl, whom moral tortures and the pangs of child-birth were putting in danger. This noble deserter from an infamous military honour, hastened to tell her of the military disgrace which would attend his marrying, and led her to the nuptial altar, where she died heart-broken with emotion.
Footnote 50:
Man, the sole support of his family, assuming an average of but two children by marriage, should always earn enough for four and spend for one: which assumes that there would be no one counting for nothing—no bachelor among men: moreover the logic of this system would be either marriage or death—fidelity in marriage or death; the certainty for the husband and the father of never having any sickness, and of assuredly surviving his wife and his children under age, &c. O logicians of the absurd!
Footnote 51:
The United States, Sweden, Prussia, England, Switzerland, &c., reject this organization: Austria, Belgium, and Italy imitate it. Let us see in which direction the path of the future lies.
Footnote 52:
Among a group of college students who were treating for a girl in the public thoroughfare, one of twelve years old at most was noticed.
Footnote 53:
The sole measure of a serious character proposed by the Senate was the prohibition of provocation in a public thoroughfare; the Government, it appears, has not even condescended to take notice of this vote. As to Article 484 of the Code, it declares, we know, that it did not regulate this matter.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Used numbers for footnotes, placing them all at the end of the last chapter. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.