r bones are often
enough twisted, sad symptoms of the degradation of parents. At every
street corner are distributed libertine productions by traders in the
depravity of the weak. If any one wishes to recognize the furnace of
vice burning within us, let him observe merely the looks cast upon an
honest woman as she passes, by respectable men, old men. What savage
expressions intercepted under the feverish light of the electric lamps!
What tension, what spasms of covetousness! What hallucinations of
pleasure and of gold! Tragic matter here, but low tragedies _a la_
Balzac, not those acted under an open sky by heroes. A few pistol-shots
from time to time, a few poisonings, some drownings: that is all that
transpires of the interior evil. The rest passes away in suppressed
tears, brooding hatreds, in accepted shame. In such confusion the
consciences of the best, of the most disinterested ones, lose the
cleanness of their stamp. "You are smiling there at an obscenity," said
I to a friend; he protested; then reflecting, agreed with me, quite
astonished that he had not perceived it. Honest men are troubled by all
this circumjacent corruption. And rightly so, for at the bottom they are
parts of it; they are distinguished from it only by more cleanliness,
education, elegance, but not by principle.

In fact, from top to bottom, all this society lives on sensation; that
is the common trait through it all, and it is graded according to the
quality of its sensations.... Fundamentally there is only sensation,
with here and there unequally subtle nerves. There are no terms less
reconcilable one to another than research of sensation and moral
obligation. There is nothing more opposed. Therefore he who expects all
from his sensations depends absolutely on externals, upon the fortuitous
things of life, in all their incoherence; he is no longer a self-centre,
he feels himself no longer responsible, his personality is dissolved,
evaporated; it does not react, and ambient nature already absorbs him,
like some dead thing....

And this is where we are. I recognize then the evil; I see it in its
extent. Nevertheless, to paint this lamentable picture once more is not
to show our moral ideas. Our moral idea is what we believe touching the
life which shall be best; it is not exactly our life.

Ever since the antique Medea of Ovid uttered that cry, many others, one
after another, have groaned over the fact that, seeing the best and
approving it