Rambouillet: "Elle est un peu trop delicate ... on
n'oscrait prononcer le mot de _cul_. Cela va dans l'exces." Half a century
later, in England, Mandeville, in the Remarks appended to his _Fable of
the Bees_, refers to the almost prudish modesty inculcated on children
from their earliest years.

[58] In one of its civilized developments, this ritualized modesty becomes
prudery, which is defined by Forel (_Die Sexuelle Frage_, Fifth ed., p.
125) as "codified sexual morality." Prudery is fossilized modesty, and no
longer reacts vitally. True modesty, in an intelligent civilized person,
is instinctively affected by motives and circumstances, responding
sensitively to its relationships.

[59] _Memoires de Madame d'Epinay_, Part I, Ch. V. Thirty years earlier,
Mandeville had written, in England, that "the modesty of women is the
result of custom and education."

[60] Goncourt, _Histoire de la Societe Francaise pendant le Directoire_,
p. 422. Clothes became so gauze-like, and receded to such an extent from
the limbs, that for a time the chemise was discarded as an awkward and
antiquated garment.

[61] _Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie_, 1901, Heft 2, p. 179.

[62] In the rural districts of Hanover, Pastor Grashoff states, "even when
natural necessities are performed with the greatest possible freedom,
there is no offence to modesty, in rural opinion." But he makes a
statement which is both contradictory and false, when he adds that
"modesty is, to the country man in general, a foreign idea."
(_Geschlechtlich-Sittliche Verhaeltnisse im Deutsche Reiche_, vol. ii, p.
45.)

[63] It is frequently stated that prostitutes are devoid of modesty, but
this is incorrect; they possess a partial and diminished modesty which,
for a considerable period still remains genuine (see e.g., Reuss, _La
Prostitution_, p. 58). Lombroso and Ferrero (_La Donna_, p. 540) refer to
the objection of prostitutes to be examined during the monthly periods as
often greater than that of respectable women. Again, Callari states
("Prostituzione in Sicilia," _Archivio di Psichiatria_, 1903, p. 205),
that Sicilian prostitutes can only with difficulty be persuaded to expose
themselves naked in the practice of their profession. Aretino long since
remarked (in _La Pippa_) that no women so detest gratuitous _decolletage_
as prostitutes. When prostitutes do not possess modesty, they frequently
simulate it, and Ferriani remarks (in his _Delinquenti Minorenni_) that of