Modesty is never excessive when it is sincere; it is never too exacting when it rises spontaneously from the heart of a lofty nature; it is a sentiment that can inspire only noble things and prepare us for sublime joys. Modesty has such power that it can elevate ignorance and simplicity to the highest spheres and encircle with a halo the most common loves as well as the most exalted; it is possessed of such esthetic energies as to smother with flowers the most bestial roar of the most brazen man and hide with an impenetrable veil the most immodest secrets of the animal man. Without any need of cloth or garments, this sublime wizard will cover a nude body with a mantle that will make it invisible and impenetrable to lust. Guardian and priest of love, it follows it at every step and defends it from the mire and from the fire, and, causing it to direct its eyes upward, elevates and sanctifies it. Parsimonious trainer of the forces of love, it preserves them always fresh and always young; and when the first kiss causes the first virgin flower to fall from the brow of a woman, modesty brings forth new and ever virgin flowers before the steps of the two lovers. Texture that conceals, glass that covers, balsam that stops every putrescence, modesty is the most powerful preserver of the affections; and, perhaps, more loves are killed by immodesty than by infidelity.
If the sentiment of modesty were not a great virtue, it would be the most faithful companion of voluptuousness, the greatest generator of exquisite joys. An ardent thirst and an inebriating cup! What joy, but what danger of satiety! Now the cup is full, foaming with lust; the lips are burning and half open to the most voluptuous kisses of the sweet liquor; but the cup is held by the hands of modesty, who with the suavest art satisfies the thirst and renews it, so that the lips eternally remain half open and thirsty, and in the chalice the liquor will last forever. Admirable prodigy of an immense wealth, which finds in itself the sources of renovation and perpetuation; stupendous spectacle of the most gigantic of forces confided to the hands of a child who guides and governs it!
We should teach modesty to our children, and above all to our little girls, as clearly as possible, and refine it, so that it may be all sincerity and delicacy, and not a conventional hypocrisy.
We may be chastely nude, and we may be cynically immodest with the body as fully covered as an onion. We teach our young girls to lower their eyes before the glance of him who seeks and desires them, and then we take them to the theater, where the ballet-dancers are more than nude from the waist down and the ladies are nude from the waist up; so that, adding together the two immodest halves of the two very different classes of women, we may easily have one woman, all nude and all immodest. We teach our daughters to conceal even the foot from the eager eyes of man, and then we trust them to the hands of the dressmaker, that she may perfect with her sartorial art the too modest curves allotted by nature, and mould in an alluring way the contours which innocent youth still left chaste and modest. True Tartufes on a reduced scale, with one hand we hide our face, while with the other we go on exploring lasciviousness. As long as this profound hypocrisy continues to penetrate into the marrow of our modern society, modesty, too, will not be very sincere or will be able to exercise only the weakest influence toward elevating and refining our loves; nor do I know whether, with all the unchaste chastity that forms our distinction, we are entitled to class ourselves proudly among the modest nations. If it be true that hypocrisy is a homage paid to virtue, let us wait until the epoch of transition is past, and we shall then feel that we really are as virtuous as we pretend to be.
CHAPTER V THE VIRGIN
Since, according to the grammar, adjectives may be either masculine or feminine, it consequently follows that man also can be virgin; but between his and woman's virginity there is an abyss which we in vain try to sound. A virgin male is a man who does not know the mysteries of the embrace; but of this innocence, or of this ignorance, he bears no trace in his body and often neither in his heart nor in his mind, since vice with its thousand subterfuges and Nature with her thousand pitfalls may have made him more impure than a courtesan, although he may boast of having never violated a vow made to a caste, to a prejudice, or to any of the many tyrannies of the will. The virgin female, on the contrary, is an entire world; she is a temple to which peoples from all parts of the world bear the tribute of their religion, their follies and their adoration; so that to write its story is to write the greater part of the ethnography of love. In this book, however, we will confine ourselves to consider the virgin, just as nature has carved her in the secrets of the maternal bosom, and as the civilization of our times sacrifices her on the altars of greed, of love, or of lust.
Nature, in creating the human virgin, has left to the torment of our meditations one of the most obscure and tremendous problems. It was not enough that sixteen long years should be required to turn a child into a woman; not enough that all moral bulwarks which keep us far from the temple of love should fall only through long and cruel battles; strategy and tactics of defense, the impenetrable veils of modesty, were deemed insufficient to push to folly the impatience of desire. All this still seemed little to avaricious and cruel nature; and when your "yes" is answered by another "yes," when barricades and bulwarks fall, when the long coquetry of refusal is wearied and modesty blushingly withdraws to a corner to relish the delights of an anxiously hoped for defeat,—there, just there, at the doors of the sacred temple, a terrible angel with a sword of fire bars the entrance and says to you: "There is a virgin here!" The rose is near to your lips, closed, it is true, but beautiful and fragrant as the dawn of spring, all collected in the chaste involutions of its hundred small leaves; but to impress a kiss on it, you must let your lips bleed, because the virgin is the thorn of a rose. Profound mystery! There, at that threshold, two natures widely different, and yet so ardently enamored, have arrived through a thousand obstacles and a thousand battles: there was their rendezvous, for them to empty together the cup of voluptuousness; but there, on that very threshold, they find the angel of sorrow, and through a wound, through a torture, they must attain joy. Cruel mystery! The poor creature who shall be a mother and the nurse and vestal of the temple of the family, the woman who in the long sleepless nights of adolescence had imagined love as the most fragrant flower, as the sweetest fruit in the orchards of life, must reach the goal of her desires through pain, as though nature from the first kiss had reminded her: "Daughter of Eve, you will love and be a mother with great pain!" And happy because she belongs to one man, happy because she is possessed and does possess, she must behold in her bleeding hands the delicate petals of the first flower which she picked in the garden of voluptuousness.
And yet there, among those torn petals, warm with innocent blood, man has erected a temple where the three most formidable passions of the human heart receive adoration, and there he has accumulated as many elements of idolatry, passion, fury, virtue, as his brain could comprehend. There self-pride, love and the sense of ownership have found themselves bound together to conspire against human happiness and at the same time to prepare the most ardent voluptuousness. "Mine!—mine for the first time!—mine forever!" Three cries, one more formidable than the other, which love, pride and the sense of ownership utter in unison, in the apotheosis of delirium and in the quivering of the flesh.