another. A woman is frumpish and old-fashioned if she does not know
that "adultery with one paramour is nick-named marriage." Just as
all shame at these vices has disappeared since the vice itself
became so widely spread, so if you made the ungrateful begin to
count their own numbers, you would both make them more numerous,
and enable them to be ungrateful with greater impunity.

XVII. "What then? shall the ungrateful man go unpunished?" What
then, I answer, shall we punish the undutiful, the malicious, the
avaricious, the headstrong, and the cruel? Do you imagine that
those things which are loathed are not punished, or do you suppose
that any punishment is greater than the hate of all men? It is a
punishment not to dare receive a benefit from anyone, not to dare
to bestow one, to be, or to fancy that you are a mark for all men's
eyes, and to lose all appreciation of so excellent and pleasant a
matter. Do you call a man unhappy who has lost his sight, or whose
hearing has been impaired by disease, and do you not call him
wretched who has lost the power of feeling benefits? He fears the
gods, the witnesses of all ingratitude; he is tortured by the
thought of the benefit which he has misapplied, and, in fine, he is
sufficiently punished by this great penalty, that, as I said
before, he cannot enjoy the fruits of this most delightful act. On
the other hand, he who takes pleasure in receiving a benefit,
enjoys an unvarying and continuous happiness, which he derives from
consideration, not of the thing given, but of the intention of the
giver. A benefit gives perpetual joy to a grateful man, but pleases
an ungrateful one only for a moment. Can the lives of such men be
compared, seeing that the one is sad and gloomy--as it is natural
that a denier of his debts and a defrauder should be, a man who
does not give his parents, his nurses, or his teachers the honour