Madame de Mascaret through his opera-glasses, said: "It is almost
incredible that that woman has had seven children!" "Yes, in eleven
years; after which, when she was thirty, she put a stop to her period of
production in order to enter into the brilliant period of
representation, which does not seem near coming to an end." "Poor
women!" "Why do you pity them?"

"Why? Ah! my dear fellow, just consider! eleven years of pregnancy, for
such a woman! What a hell! All her youth, all her beauty, every hope of
success, every poetical ideal of a bright life, sacrificed to that
abominable law of reproduction which turns the normal woman into a mere
machine for reproduction." "What would you have? It is only nature!"

"Yes, but I say that nature is our enemy, that we must always fight
against nature, for she is continually bringing us back to an animal
state. You may be sure that God has not put anything onto this earth
that is clean, pretty, elegant, or accessory to our ideal, but the human
brain has done it. It is we who have introduced a little grace, beauty,
unknown charm and mystery into creation by singing about it,
interpreting it, by admiring it as poets, idealizing it as artists, and
by explaining it as learned men who make mistakes, but who find
ingenious reasons, some grace and beauty, some unknown charm and mystery
in the various phenomena of nature. God only created coarse beings, full
of the germs of disease, and who, after a few years of bestial
enjoyment, grow old and infirm, with all the ugliness and all the want
of power of human decrepitude. He only seems to have made them in order
that they may reproduce their species in a dirty manner, and then die
like ephemeral insects. I said, _reproduce their species in a dirty
manner_, and I adhere to that expression. What is there, as a matter of
fact, more ignoble and more repugnant than that filthy and ridiculous