The Equinox (Volume I, Number X)

THE KEY OF THE MYSTERIES and which one ought to hide: they are indecencies which one must avoid in advance by removing opportunity, but which one must never seek to surprise: morality proscribes scandal. Every scandal is a turpitude. One is not indecent because one possesses organs which modesty does not name, but one is obscene when one exhibits them. Husbands, hide your domestic wounds; do not strip your wives naked before the laughter of the mob! Women, do not advertise the discomforts of the conjugal bed: to do so is to write yourselves prostitutes in public opinion. It needs a lofty degree of courage to keep conjugal faith; it isa pact of heroism of which only great souls can under- stand the whole extent. Marriages which break are not marriages: they are couplings. A woman who abandons her husband, what can she be- come? She is no more a wife, and she is not a widow; what is she then? She is an apostate from honour who is forced to be licentious because she is neither virgin nor free. A husband who abandons his wife prostitutes her, and deserves the infamous name that one applies to the lovers of lost women. Marriage is then sacred and indissoluble when it really exists. But it cannot really exist, except for beings of a lofty intelligence and of a noble heart. The animals do not marry, and men who live like animals undergo the fatalities of the brute nature. They ceaselessly make unfortunate attempts to act E 49