out
a purpose or a moral; she hears the blind man in the street singing the
frightful song he had sung when she was returning all in a perspiration
and hideous from an adulterous meeting; it is the same blind man whom
she saw at each of those meetings; the blind man who pursued her with
his song and his importunity; it is he who comes now to personify human
rage at the instant when Divine pity comes to her and follows her to the
supreme moment of death! And this is called an outrage against public
morals! But I say, on the contrary, that it is an homage to public
morals, that there is nothing more moral than this; I say that in this
book the vice of education is awake, that it is taken from the true,
from the living flesh of our society, and that at each stroke the author
places before us this question: "Have you done what you ought for the
education of your daughters? Is the religion you have given them such as
will sustain them in the tempests of life, or is it only a mass of
carnal superstitions which leaves them without support when the storm
rages? Have you taught them that life is not the realization of
chimerical dreams, that it is something prosaic to which it is necessary
to accommodate oneself? Have you taught them that? Have you done what
you ought for their happiness? Have you said to them: Poor children,
outside the route I have pointed out to you, in the pleasures you may
pursue, only disgust awaits you, trouble, disorder, dilapidation,
convulsions, and execution...." And you will see that if anything were
lacking in the picture, the sheriff's officer is there; there, too, is
the Jew who has seized and sold her furniture to satisfy the caprices of
this woman; and the husband is still ignorant of this. Nothing remains
for the unfortunate woman, except death!

But, said the Public Minister, her death is voluntary; this woman died
in her own time.

But how could she live? Was she not condemned? Had she not drunk to the
last dregs her shame and baseness?

Yes, upon our stage we show women who have strayed (and I cannot say
what they have done) as happy, charming and smiling. _Questam corpore
facerant_. I limit myself to this remark: When they show them to us
happy, charming, enveloped in muslin, presenting a gracious hand to
counts, marquises and dukes, often responding themselves to the name of
countess or duchess, you call that respecting public morals. But the man
who depicts the adulterous woman dying a