humiliating. I may add that even in the midst of these
dissipations I retained a certain reserve. The contacts to which
I exposed myself failed to soil me; nothing was left when I had
crossed the threshold. I have always retained, from that forcible
and indifferent commerce, the habit of attributing no consequence
to the action of the flesh. The amorous function, which religion
and morality have surrounded with mystery or seasoned with sin,
seems to me a function like any other, a little vile, but
agreeable, and one to which the usual epilogue is too long....
This kind of companionship only lasted for a short time." This
analysis of the attitude of a certain common type of civilized
modern man seems to be just, but it may perhaps occur to some
readers that a commerce which led to "the action of the flesh"
being regarded as of no consequence can scarcely be said to have
left no taint.

In a somewhat similar manner, Henri de Regnier, in his novel,
_Les Rencontres de Monsieur Breot_ (p. 50), represents Bercaille
as deliberately preferring to take his pleasures with
servant-girls rather than with ladies, for pleasure was, to his
mind, a kind of service, which could well be accommodated with
the services they are accustomed to give; and then they are
robust and agreeable, they possess the _naivete_ which is always
charming in the common people, and they are not apt to be
repelled by those little accidents which might offend the
fastidious sensibilities of delicately bred ladies.

Bloch, who has especially emphasized this side of the appeal of
prostitution (_Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit_, pp. 359-362),
refers to the delicate and sensitive young Danish writer, J.P.
Jakobsen, who seems to have acutely felt the contrast between the
higher and more habitual impulses, and the occasional outburst of
what he felt to be lower instincts; in his _Niels Lyhne_ he
describes the kind of double life in which a man is true for a
fortnight to the god he worships, and is then overcome by other
powers which madly bear him in their grip towards what he feels
to be humiliating, perverse, and filthy. "At such moments," Bloch
remarks, "the man is another being. The 'two souls' in the breast
become a reality. Is that the famous scholar, the lofty idealist,
the fine-souled aesthetician, the artis