p a defence, either for
the virtuous women or the celibates; but we have in reserve for them a
final remark.

Increase the number of honest women and diminish the number of
celibates, as much as you choose, you will always find that the result
will be a larger number of gallant adventurers than of honest women;
you will always find a vast multitude driven through social custom to
commit three sorts of crime.

If they remain chaste, their health is injured, while they are the
slaves of the most painful torture; they disappoint the sublime ends
of nature, and finally die of consumption, drinking milk on the
mountains of Switzerland!

If they yield to legitimate temptations, they either compromise the
honest women, and on this point we re-enter on the subject of this
book, or else they debase themselves by a horrible intercourse with
the five hundred thousand women of whom we spoke in the third category
of the first Meditation, and in this case, have still considerable
chance of visiting Switzerland, drinking milk and dying there!

Have you never been struck, as we have been, by a certain error of
organization in our social order, the evidence of which gives a moral
certainty to our last calculations?

The average age at which a man marries is thirty years; the average
age at which his passions, his most violent desires for genesial
delight are developed, is twenty years. Now during the ten fairest
years of his life, during the green season in which his beauty, his
youth and his wit make him more dangerous to husbands than at any
other epoch of his life, his finds himself without any means of
satisfying legitimately that irresistible craving for love which burns
in his whole nature. During this time, representing the sixth part of
human life, we are obliged to admit that the sixth part or less of our
total male population and the sixth part which is the most vigorous is
placed in a position which is perpetually exhausting for them, and
dangerous for society.

"Why don't they get married?" cries a religious woman.

But what father of good sense would wish his son to be married at
twenty years of age?

Is not the danger of these precocious unions apparent at all? It would
seem as if marriage was a state very much at variance with natural
habitude, seeing that it requires a special ripeness of judgment in
those who conform to it. All the world knows what Rousseau said:
"There must always be a period of libertinage