deceive your husband, have
fifty lovers, provided that at the end you lament your faults, God will
have only tenderness for you, and will receive you with open arms. I should
like to know if by chance their Jesus had taken a wife, what would have
been his opinion then of the woman taken in adultery; but he remained
single and consequently incompetent to decide upon that delicate matter.
All that, you see, is an encouragement to debauchery and a stimulant to
lewdness. A devout woman, when she is young and pretty, is on a slope which
leads quite straight to Monsieur le Cure's bed.

XVIII.

THE VISIT.

"Stupefied, the pedant closed his
mouth, and opened his eyes."

LEON CLADEL (Titi Foyssac IV).

If there are any beings as blind as the husbands, they are certainly the
fathers; with the latter, as with the former, blindness reaches its utmost
limits. Since Moliere no one laughs at them any more, and I don't know why,
for they always deserve to be laughed at, while all the sarcasms have
fallen on the head of the unhappy husbands.

Folly and injustice! Conjugal love is as respectable as paternal affection.
Love is as good as affection, and what the heart chooses is quite as good
as what the blood gives you.

Why then do they complain if it is papa who is deceived, and laugh if it is
a husband. Exactly the contrary ought to occur. Paternal love is egotistic.
It is for the most part vanity and self-love. The father looks for his own
likeness in his offspring, and if he believes himself to be an eagle, his
son naturally must be an eaglet. Most frequently he is only a foolish
gosling, but the father insists on finding on him an eagle's plumes. If
then he is deceived in his hopes, which are only a deduction from his own
infatuation, it is certainly permissible to laugh at it.

While the husband....

This is what I observed to Durand, which put him in a great passion.

--Because my daughter has gone to Mass? And you say: "fathers are blind."
Here is a self-contradictory individual. One can see plainly that you are
not a father, or you would alter your theories. Hang it! You can't say I am
enchanted at it, but you must put yourself in a man's place. She is a
child, who leaves school, mark that well, where she was obliged, compelled
to perform her religious duties, and one does not break off in a couple of
days the habits of ten years like that. Give her time to reach it. I reason
with her; hang it, I can't