Chapter 12

"Strange theory!" cried I.

"Strange in what? According to all the doctrines of the Church, the
world will have an end. Science teaches the same fatal conclusions.
Why, then, is it strange that the same thing should result from moral
Doctrine? 'Let those who can, contain,' said Christ. And I take this
passage literally, as it is written. That morality may exist between
people in their worldly relations, they must make complete chastity
their object. In tending toward this end, man humiliates himself. When
he shall reach the last degree of humiliation, we shall have moral
marriage.

"But if man, as in our society, tends only toward physical love, though
he may clothe it with pretexts and the false forms of marriage, he will
have only permissible debauchery, he will know only the same immoral
life in which I fell and caused my wife to fall, a life which we call
the honest life of the family. Think what a perversion of ideas must
arise when the happiest situation of man, liberty, chastity, is looked
upon as something wretched and ridiculous. The highest ideal, the best
situation of woman, to be pure, to be a vestal, a virgin, excites fear
and laughter in our society. How many, how many young girls sacrifice
their purity to this Moloch of opinion by marrying rascals that they
may not remain virgins,--that is, superiors! Through fear of finding
themselves in that ideal state, they ruin themselves.

"But I did not understand formerly, I did not understand that the words
of the Gospel, that 'he who looks upon a woman to lust after her has
already committed adultery,' do not apply to the wives of others, but
notably and especially to our own wives. I did not understand this, and
I thought that the honeymoon and all of my acts during that period
were virtuous, and that to satisfy one's desires with his wife is an
eminently chaste thing. Know, then, that I consider these departures,
these isolations, which young married couples arrange with the
permission of their parents, as nothing else than a license to engage in
debauchery.

"I saw, then, in this nothing bad or shameful, and, hoping for great
joys, I began to live the honeymoon. And very certainly none of these
joys followed. But I had faith, and was determined to have them,
cost what they might. But the more I tried to secure them, the less
I succeeded. All this time I felt anxious, ashamed, and weary. Soon I
began to suffer. I believe that on the third or fourth day I found my
wife sad and asked her the reason. I began to embrace her, which in my
opinion was all that she could desire. She put me away with her hand,
and began to weep.

"At what? She could not tell me. She was filled with sorrow, with