_Prostituee_ (1907)--a novel which has attracted wide attention
and been translated into various languages--has sought to
represent the condition of women in our actual society, and more
especially the condition of the prostitute under what he regards
as the odious and iniquitous system still prevailing. The book is
a faithful picture of the real facts, thanks to the assistance
the author received from the Paris Prefecture of Police, and
largely for that reason is not altogether a satisfactory work of
art, but it vividly and poignantly represents the cruelty,
indifference, and hypocrisy so often shown by men towards women,
and is a book which, on that account, cannot be too widely read.
One of the most notable of modern plays is Brieux's _Les Avaries_
(1902). This distinguished dramatist, himself a medical man,
dedicates his play to Fournier, the greatest of syphilographers.
"I think with you," he writes here, "that syphilis will lose much
of its danger when it is possible to speak openly of an evil
which is neither a shame nor a punishment, and when those who
suffer from it, knowing what evils they may propagate, will
better understand their duties towards others and towards
themselves." The story developed in the drama is the old and
typical story of the young man who has spent his bachelor days in
what he considers a discrete and regular manner, having only had
two mistresses, neither of them prostitutes, but at the end of
this period, at a gay supper at which he bids farewell to his
bachelor life, he commits a fatal indiscretion and becomes
infected by syphilis; his marriage is approaching and he goes to
a distinguished specialist who warns him that treatment takes
time, and that marriage is impossible for several years; he finds
a quack, however, who undertakes to cure him in six months; at
the end of the time he marries; a syphilitic child is born; the
wife discovers the state of things and forsakes her home to
return to her parents; her indignant father, a deputy in
Parliament, arrives in Paris; the last word is with the great
specialist who brings finally some degree of peace and hope into
the family. The chief morals Brieux points out are that it is the
duty of the bride's parents before marriage to ascertain the
bridegroom's health; that the bridegroom should have a