despairing; they will be desirous of putting up 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