Chapter II: The Arrest (3)

and there is no law against that. As to this unfortunate girl, after all, it is her own fault! Why did she not repulse him? Then she would not have committed a crime,--a monstrous crime! which really puts all society to the blush.' And the hatter or the furrier would be right,--perfectly right. What is there to criminate this gentleman? Of what complicity, direct or indirect, moral or material, can he be charged? This lucky rogue has seduced a pretty girl, and he it is who has brought her there; he does not deny it; where is the law that prevents or punishes him? Society merely says: There are gay young fellows abroad,--let the pretty girls beware! But if a poor wretch, through want or stupidity, constraint, or ignorance of the laws which he cannot read, buys knowingly a rag which has been stolen, he will be sent to the galleys for twenty years as a receiver, if such be the punishment for the theft itself. This is logical, powerful reasoning,--'Without receivers there would be no thieves, without thieves there would be no receivers.' No, no more pity, then--even less pity--for him who excites to the evil than he who perpetrates it. Let the smallest degree of complicity be visited with terrible punishment! Good; there is in that a serious and fertile thought, high and moral. We should bow before Society which had dictated such a law; but we remember that this Society, so inexorable towards the smallest complicity of crime against things, is so framed that a simple and ingenuous man, who should try to prove that there is at least moral similarity, material complicity, between the fickle seducer and the seduced and forsaken girl, would be laughed at as a visionary. And if this simple man were to assert that without a father there would, in all probability, not be offspring, Society would exclaim against the atrocity,--the folly! And it would be right,--quite right; for, after all, this gay youth who might say these fine things to the jury, however little he might like tragic emotions, might yet go tranquilly to see his mistress executed,--executed for child-murder, a crime to which he was an accessory; nay more, the author, in consequence of his shameless abandonment! Does not this charming protection, granted to the male portion of society for certain gay doings suggested by the god of Love, show plainly that France still sacrifices to the Graces, and is still the most gallant nation in the world?"