different coronets. I looked at one after another, each recalling
a separate shame, and I said that God had been merciful to the
poor child, in not having left her to pay the ordinary penalty,
but rather to die in the midst of her beauty and luxury, before
the coming of old age, the courtesan's first death.

Is there anything sadder in the world than the old age of vice,
especially in woman? She preserves no dignity, she inspires no
interest. The everlasting repentance, not of the evil ways
followed, but of the plans that have miscarried, the money that
has been spent in vain, is as saddening a thing as one can well
meet with. I knew an aged woman who had once been "gay," whose
only link with the past was a daughter almost as beautiful as she
herself had been. This poor creature to whom her mother had never
said, "You are my child," except to bid her nourish her old age
as she herself had nourished her youth, was called Louise, and,
being obedient to her mother, she abandoned herself without
volition, without passion, without pleasure, as she would have
worked at any other profession that might have been taught her.

The constant sight of dissipation, precocious dissipation, in
addition to her constant sickly state, had extinguished in her
mind all the knowledge of good and evil that God had perhaps
given her, but that no one had ever thought of developing. I
shall always remember her, as she passed along the boulevards
almost every day at the same hour, accompanied by her mother as
assiduously as a real mother might have accompanied her daughter.
I was very young then, and ready to accept for myself the easy
morality of the age. I remember, however, the contempt and
disgust which awoke in me at the sight of this scandalous