That the honest woman is a being essentially _budgetative_, and active
as a consumer;

That the least decline in public love would involve incalculable
miseries to the treasury, and to men of invested fortunes;

That a husband has at least a third of his fortune invested in the
inconstancy of his wife, etc.

I am well aware that you are going to open your mouth and talk to me
about manners, politics, good and evil. But, my dear victim of the
Minotaur, is not happiness the object which all societies should set
before them? Is it not this axiom that makes these wretched kings give
themselves so much trouble about their people? Well, the honest woman
has not, like them, thrones, gendarmes and tribunals; she has only a
bed to offer; but if our four hundred thousand women can, by this
ingenious machine, make a million celibates happy, do not they attain
in a mysterious manner, and without making any fuss, the end aimed at
by a government, namely, the end of giving the largest possible amount
of happiness to the mass of mankind?

"Yes, but the annoyances, the children, the troubles--"

Ah, you must permit me to proffer the consolatory thought with which
one of our wittiest caricaturists closes his satiric observations:
"Man is not perfect!" It is sufficient, therefore, that our
institutions have no more disadvantages than advantages in order to be
reckoned excellent; for the human race is not placed, socially
speaking, between the good and the bad, but between the bad and the
worse. Now if the work, which we are at present on the point of