e monk
inflicted upon them by an absurd theological code.

And since this old man's death, his ideas had prevailed. Abandoned
children were sheltered instead of being killed and yet their lives
daily became increasingly rigorous and barren! Then, under pretext of
liberty and progress, Society had discovered another means of
increasing man's miseries by tearing him from his home, forcing him to
don a ridiculous uniform and carry weapons, by brutalizing him in a
slavery in every respect like that from which he had compassionately
freed the negro, and all to enable him to slaughter his neighbor
without risking the scaffold like ordinary murderers who operate
single-handed, without uniforms and with weapons that are less swift
and deafening.

Des Esseintes wondered if there had ever been such a time as ours. Our
age invokes the causes of humanity, endeavors to perfect anaesthesia
to suppress physical suffering. Yet at the same time it prepares these
very stimulants to increase moral wretchedness.

Ah! if ever this useless procreation should be abolished, it were now.
But here, again, the laws enacted by men like Portalis and Homais
appeared strange and cruel.

In the matter of generation, Justice finds the agencies for deception
to be quite natural. It is a recognized and acknowledged fact. There
is scarcely a home of any station that does not confide its children
to the drain pipes, or that does not employ contrivances that are
freely sold, and which it would enter no person's mind to prohibit.
And yet, if these subterfuges proved insufficient, if the attempt
miscarried and if, to remedy matters, one had recourse to more
efficacious measures, ah! then there were not prisons enough, not
municipal jails enough to confine those who, in good faith, were
condemned by other individuals who had that very evening, on the
conjugal bed, done their utmost to avoid giving birth to children.

The deceit itself was not a crime, it seemed. The crime lay in the
justification of the deceit.

What Society considered a crime was the act of killing a being endowed
with life; and yet, in expelling a foetus, one destroyed an animal
that was less formed and living and certainly less intelligent and
more ugly than a dog or a cat, although it is permissible to strangle
these creatures as soon as they are born.

It is only right to add, for the sake of fairness, thought Des
Esseintes, that it is not the awkward man, who generally loses no