Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/65

Rh of his changeable sexual appetite. For the simple reason, moreover, that women are to be had for the asking, most men do not know how to appreciate them. Thousands of men have before marriage lost the capacity of entering into a sincere or moral relation, and give their wives nothing but their name.

A new epoch now begins for the married man, the epoch of conjugal deception. What he had formerly done almost publicly he now does secretly, and often at an incredible expense of hypocrisy and cunning. Very few women in the least suspect the dissipations of their husbands, and I know not whether it is for their good that they suspect nothing. In Paris, to be sure, women generally know how they stand with their husbands, and they know also how to provide against being pitied.

If all men were to write Rousseauian Confessions concerning their secret sexual doings, the greater part of the educated women would be driven to despair or turn away from the male sex in disgust. Not a few of those married men who formerly associated with courtesans because they had no wives now address themselves to their wives only when they have no courtesans.

Now, although most men are in a certain sense "not worthy to unloose the latchet of the shoes" of the commonest woman, much less to "unfasten her girdle," yet they make the most extravagant