4. In Paris, in December, 1906 (according to the Vossische Zeitung of December 15, 1906, No. 558), a band of youthful street and shop thieves, ten in number, of ages varying from eleven to fourteen years, were arrested. Their leaders were a boy of twelve and a girl of thirteen years, the latter, Eliza Cailles by name, known generally by the nickname of “Beautiful Aliette.” This Aliette, a strikingly pretty little person, in a long dress of extremely fashionable cut, with a wonderful hat and most elegant gloves, ruled her band with the most exemplary self-confidence. They were all smart fellows; they were all of them her lovers, and with these ten husbands she was the happiest of wives.
Acts of fornication with children also explain the melancholy phenomenon of the existence of a widely diffused child prostitution in all large towns of the old and new world, regarding which, in the previously mentioned works on prostitution in these towns, detailed accounts will be found.[644] The little flower-girls of Paris, the Berlin match-sellers and wax-candle-sellers or “music pupils”—all these provide a large contingent to child prostitution. To a great extent they are associated with equally youthful criminals and souteneurs, and avail themselves for blackmailing purposes of the existence of § 1763 and § 186 of the Criminal Code. Among them there are even individuals given to peculiar sexual “specialities,” who gratify perverse lusts in various artificial ways. Social misery, bad example, and seduction are, indeed, often to be blamed as causes of this early sexual depravity, but it is precisely in respect of child prostitution that Lombroso’s doctrine of the born prostitute has considerable justification.
In exceptional cases only does incest—sexual intercourse between those nearly related by blood, either in the same generation, as between brother and sister, or in the ascending and descending line—depend upon pathological causes. The origin of the dread and horror inspired by incest remains “a moot question of historical research.”[645] Within historical times and among savage peoples incestuous intercourse was permitted and widely diffused. Without doubt, racial hygienic experience regarding the pernicious effects of this extreme form of incest gave rise to the recognition of the fact that incest must be forbidden. At the present day incest occurs almost exclusively as the result of chance associations—as, for example, in alcoholic intoxication, in consequence of close domestic intimacy in small dwellings, in the absence of other opportunity for sexual intercourse. In such circumstances not infrequently among the lower classes of the population we observe, as a favouring factor, a complete absence of any conception of the immorality of incest.
Remarkable is the tendency to incestuous unions in certain epochs—as, for example, in the period of the French Rococo, when it was introduced by suggestion on a large scale, and manifested itself with alarming frequency. Numerous credible historical examples of this I have recorded in my “Recent Researches concerning the Marquis de Sade” (pp. 165-168). Mirabeau, and especially Rétif de la Bretonne (see my work on Rétif, pp. 381-382), luxuriated in horribly blasphemous incestuous ideas.[646] According to Theodor Mundt, who speaks of these tendencies in his sketches of “Paris during the Second Empire” (vol. i., pp. 141, 142; Berlin, 1867), it appears that the French nature is not repelled to the same degree as the German by the idea of sexual union between those nearly related by blood. Eugene Sue relates, in his “Mysteries of Paris,” that among the lowest strata of the population fathers often have intercourse with their own daughters.
But such things also happen in Germany. In August, 1907, a manual labourer, forty-seven years of age, was condemned to three years’ imprisonment because he had had incestuous intercourse with his daughter, now twenty-seven years of age, during the previous fifteen years (!), and had continued this incestuous relationship after he had himself remarried. The girl had been for several years living in intimate sexual relationship with her father, who watched jealously to prevent his daughter having anything to do with another man. Among many Indian tribes of Central America incest is said to be always practised when the eldest daughter accompanies the father for a few days into the mountains, in order to prepare his maize bread for him.
Relations somewhat analogous are those in which parent and child have sexual intercourse with the same person—when, for example, mother and daughter have the same lover. Other peculiar combinations are possible, and are actually observed. Unique, however, would appear to be the case reported by d’Estoc (“Paris-Eros,” p. 209), in which a young man had sexual intercourse with a woman, with her two daughters, and also utilized the father of this family as a passive pæderast! In a manuscript novel, which I once saw, a man was made the lover of both husband and wife.
One of the most remarkable of sexual aberrations, in the reality of which, as Mirabeau[647] remarked, it is hardly possible to believe, is fornication with animals—zoophilia and bestiality.[648]
We will first describe zoophilia, a sexual inclination towards animals without actual sexual intercourse. Genuine zoophilia, or “animal fetichism,” as a perversion monopolizing the human being’s circle of sexual ideas, is very rare. Until recently, only a single case has been published—that recorded by Dr. Hanc in 1887, in the Wiener Medizinische Blâtter, and quoted also by von Krafft-Ebing. But I myself, in the year 1905, observed a second case of genuine zoophilia, and have recorded it elsewhere.[649] This extraordinarily rare case may as well be once more detailed here:
The person concerned was a farmer, forty-two years of age, of a large and imposing appearance, a healthy aspect, and normal conformation. His family history did not show any points of importance throwing light on the peculiar development of his vita sexualis. In the family several unhappy marriages had occurred. The patient’s parents had also lived in such an inharmonious marriage. His mother had a masterful manner; he felt no love for her. He knew nothing of any sexual abnormalities in his family. He lays especial stress upon the fact that when an infant he was brought up on the bottle, and that in this way he missed the first unconscious natural sexual stimulations which, according to the theory propounded by S. Freud, proceed from the suckling at the maternal breast. To this he mainly ascribes his lack of sexual sensibility towards the female sex. When he was a boy twelve years of age, the patient experienced sexual excitement for the first time when riding on a fine horse. Since that time his sexual sensibility as a whole has been closely connected with the idea of fine horses, in this way, that merely to look at them produced libidinous excitement, so that for years, once a week, while riding, he had an ejaculation, accompanied by intense voluptuous sensations. It is, however, remarkable that he never had any erotic dreams connected with horses. As already stated, his sexual sensibility regarding the human female, and also the human male, is non-existent. His views regarding women are Schopenhauerian. The few attempts he had made at intimate intercourse with women—in most cases these were puellæ publicæ—were repulsive to him; he had on these occasions no erection at all, or only a very slight one. The vita sexualis of the patient is, speaking generally, by no means an active one. He does not experience nocturnal pollutions, and is completely satisfied sexually by the weekly ejaculations and libidinous excitement which occurs when riding on horseback. For several years the patient has suffered from frequent insomnia, the cause of which he considered to be material troubles combined with gloomy thoughts about his abnormal sexual condition. Bromides, veronal, and other hypnotic drugs, are of little use to him, for habituation soon sets in; on the other hand, cold foot-baths have a better effect. The patient, who, as he himself says, has a strong antipathy to normal sexual intercourse, which he regards as a “bestial act,” believes that he might perhaps attain a normal sexual condition if he could meet with a wife who would be sympathetic, and would be in harmony with him mentally and physically. He is, however, in this respect extremely sceptical, since he is well aware of the rarity of that complete harmony which is the indispensable prerequisite of a happy marriage. The patient exhibited no symptoms whatever of “degeneration.” The genital organs were normal, and nervous sleeplessness in a man forty-two years of age, dependent upon material cares and emotional depression, cannot be regarded as a symptom of degeneration, when we reflect how frequently in persons who are otherwise quite healthy such nervous insomnia may make its appearance, as a result of the struggle for life, at or near the age of forty years.
True zoophilia is a typical sexual perversion, and appears to occur principally in men. The use of animals (dogs) for purely onanistic purposes, in the way of licking the female genital organs, cannot be included in this connexion. In French novels and moral studies of recent times such types of zoophilous women are, indeed, described; thus, for example, in Octave Mirbeau’s “Badereise eines Neurasthenikers” (1902) we find a description of Princess Karagnine as such a perverse woman, endowed with a peculiar “passion for animals,” especially for stallions, who caresses them with obvious signs of sexual excitement. And in the de Goncourts’ “Diary” I find the following remark: