Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/93

Rh instance, the "enfants de la patrie" are deposited in the gutters of the street. The rich seduce the girls, the priests curse the seduced girls, and the seduced girls murder the sharers of their poverty and the proofs of their imaginary shame. This is in three words the morality of our present hypocritical society in these matters.

When you have wedded your daughters to rich roués, you welcome their children with joy; if your family is increased by a poor lover, who is not able to "marry," then you heap reproaches on the mother. The reason for the disgrace which you create does not lie therefore in the act to which you try to attach it, but in the single miserable circumstance that you must support the children of your daughters. But if this is the reason of your anger, then why not have the courage to call it by its right name, and do not commit the hypocrisy of expressing a pecuniary consideration in the form of a condemnation of human nature in its most beautiful impulse. You will then reach the conclusion that it is not love that is to blame, but the unnatural conditions which hinder thousands, yes, millions, from living out their natural instincts in a moral relation.

How must a Héloïse, who, although surrounded by the piety of the Middle Ages, would rather be the lover than the legal wife of Abèlard — how must she appear to you, coarse fellows, who judge love only from the standpoint of priests, and