es exalted under their influence. But every
man who becomes famous either for good or evil, the fashionable actor,
the celebrated tenor, etc., has the power of exciting love in women.
Women without education or those of inferior mental quality are
naturally more easily affected by the bodily strength of man, and by
his external appearance in general. Many women are especially liable
to succumb under the influence of all that is mystic. These become
infatuated by preachers, and religious enthusiasts, to say nothing of
hypocrites.

Nothing is sadder than the contrast between the exalted love of a
virtuous and chaste young girl, and the debauched life, with its
traits of cynical pornography, of the majority of young men. Guy de
Maupassant has described this contrast in a most striking manner in
his romance entitled "_Une Vie_." I know a number of cases in which
the complete ignorance of young married women with regard to sexual
relations, combined with the cynical lewdness of their husbands, has
transformed the exalted love of a young girl into profound disgust,
and has sometimes even caused mental disorders. Although not very
common, the psychoses resulting from the deception and shock of the
nuptial night are not very rare. But what is much worse than this
douche of cold water which suddenly substitutes the reality of coitus
for the ideal exaltation of sentiment, are the subsequent discoveries
made by the young wife, when the cynical mind of her husband on the
subject of sexual connection and love is unveiled to her in all its
grossness, resulting from his previous life of debauchery. Torn and
sullied in its deepest fibers, the feminine mind then becomes the seat
of a desperate struggle between reality full of deceptions and the
illusions of a dream of happiness.

If it is only a question of bad habits, or want of tact in the
husband, behind which there exists perhaps true love, the wounds in
the woman's sentiment may heal and intimacy may develop; but when the
cynicism is too marked, when the habits of sexual debauchery are too
inveterate, the love of a virtuous woman is soon stifled, and is
changed to resignation and disgust, often to martyrdom or hatred.

In other cases the woman is weak and ill-developed and allows herself
to sink to the level of her husband's sentiments. Sometimes, the
crisis is accentuated and leads to divorce. In de Maupassant's "_Une
Vie_," he describes with profound insight the continuous dec