Since, according to the grammar, adjectives may be either masculine or feminine, it consequently follows that man also can be virgin; but between his and woman's virginity there is an abyss which we in vain try to sound. A virgin male is a man who does not know the mysteries of the embrace; but of this innocence, or of this ignorance, he bears no trace in his body and often neither in his heart nor in his mind, since vice with its thousand subterfuges and Nature with her thousand pitfalls may have made him more impure than a courtesan, although he may boast of having never violated a vow made to a caste, to a prejudice, or to any of the many tyrannies of the will. The virgin female, on the contrary, is an entire world; she is a temple to which peoples from all parts of the world bear the tribute of their religion, their follies and their adoration; so that to write its story is to write the greater part of the ethnography of love. In this book, however, we will confine ourselves to consider the virgin, just as nature has carved her in the secrets of the maternal bosom, and as the civilization of our times sacrifices her on the altars of greed, of love, or of lust.

Nature, in creating the human virgin, has left to the torment of our meditations one of the most obscure and tremendous problems. It was not enough that sixteen long years should be required to turn a child into a woman; not enough that all moral bulwarks which keep us far from the temple of love should fall only through long and cruel battles; strategy and tactics of defense, the impenetrable veils of modesty, were deemed insufficient to push to folly the impatience of desire. All this still seemed little to avaricious and cruel nature; and when your "yes" is answered by another "yes," when barricades and bulwarks fall, when the long coquetry of refusal is wearied and modesty blushingly withdraws to a corner to relish the delights of an anxiously hoped for defeat,—there, just there, at the doors of the sacred temple, a terrible angel with a sword of fire bars the entrance and says to you: "There is a virgin here!" The rose is near to your lips, closed, it is true, but beautiful and fragrant as the dawn of spring, all collected in the chaste involutions of its hundred small leaves; but to impress a kiss on it, you must let your lips bleed, because the virgin is the thorn of a rose. Profound mystery! There, at that threshold, two natures widely different, and yet so ardently enamored, have arrived through a thousand obstacles and a thousand battles: there was their rendezvous, for them to empty together the cup of voluptuousness; but there, on that very threshold, they find the angel of sorrow, and through a wound, through a torture, they must attain joy. Cruel mystery! The poor creature who shall be a mother and the nurse and vestal of the temple of the family, the woman who in the long sleepless nights of adolescence had imagined love as the most fragrant flower, as the sweetest fruit in the orchards of life, must reach the goal of her desires through pain, as though nature from the first kiss had reminded her: "Daughter of Eve, you will love and be a mother with great pain!" And happy because she belongs to one man, happy because she is possessed and does possess, she must behold in her bleeding hands the delicate petals of the first flower which she picked in the garden of voluptuousness.

And yet there, among those torn petals, warm with innocent blood, man has erected a temple where the three most formidable passions of the human heart receive adoration, and there he has accumulated as many elements of idolatry, passion, fury, virtue, as his brain could comprehend. There self-pride, love and the sense of ownership have found themselves bound together to conspire against human happiness and at the same time to prepare the most ardent voluptuousness. "Mine!—mine for the first time!—mine forever!" Three cries, one more formidable than the other, which love, pride and the sense of ownership utter in unison, in the apotheosis of delirium and in the quivering of the flesh.

There is a unit for all the series, there is a virgin for all human things: to be the first means to be vastly different from being the second. Now, nature wished to consecrate anatomically the first kiss, the first embrace; to incarnate in a physical fact that tremendous unit which is called the first love. And civilized man, suspicious, jealous, avaricious, gives thanks to Nature for having come and borne testimony to the purity of a woman, and blesses her for having known how to bind a covenant of faith which no one can ever violate with impunity. The Longobards used to give the morgincap to the bride immediately after the first night of matrimony; and this famous gift, the prize of virginity, often equaled the fourth part of the husband's estate. Some shrewd spouses (adds the malicious historian) had the good sense of stipulating beforehand the conditions of a gift which they were too sure of not deserving. However, although we are not Longobards, we promise to all our young girls a morgincap to induce them to guard intact, until the supreme day of the official first love, the sacred will. This morgincap is a husband; it is the esteem, the veneration, the adoration of all. With that veil intact, you are a saint, a virgin, an angel; the goal of all desires; you may entertain the most foolish ambitions; you may become a queen tomorrow. If that flimsy veil is rent, you are young, beautiful, perhaps, as pure as you were yesterday, but you are nothing more than a human female. The temple has been violated, the idol overthrown, the priests have fled, hurling anathemas and invoking the vengeance of their god upon the head of the victim. What a tangle of mysteries and injustices! I really feel as if I were in the world of exorcism and necromancy!

The poet finds not one, but a thousand theories to explain the virgin. The thorn beside the rose, the temple guarded by the wings of an angel, the first voluptuousness consecrated by a first pain, the destinies of the lives of future beings marked from the first kiss, all spasm and sweetness; and an infinite mystery which covers with its crepuscules one of the grandest and most beautiful scenes of the human world: such is the virgin of the poet.

And the moralist, too, finds in his theological theories a hundred reasons for the explanation of the virgin. The protection of virtue consecrated by a material defense, a kind admonition that love will lead us to a thousand sorrows, a sure guarantee of the honesty of the bride given to the bridegroom in the most solemn manner, a precious pledge of future faith, of everlasting domestic happiness,—there is the virgin of the theologian.

But the naturalist shakes his head and rejects the virgin of the poet and scoffs at the virgin of the theologian. Every organ must have its function; every effect must have its cause; every "why" must be answered by a "because." The virgin is for me an inceptive angel; she is the first shadow of a future separation of two things which are still brutally coupled in us: the organs of love and the organs of a bodily function. The more the living beings elevate themselves, the more they subdivide their labors; and in a creature higher than we, love will certainly have a determined and reserved ground. From the "cloaca maxima" we have arrived at two smaller ones; a step further, and we shall have three organs and three apparatus; one of the greatest physical disgraces of our body will be eliminated.

A virgin is a creature who does a great deal more of good than evil, and very few among the men, if asked to vote for or against her, would blackball her. I do not know whether all women would vote with us, but I believe that the best, the most virtuous, the most beautiful, the most poetical of them would side with us. Open temples are always less sacred than closed ones, and a mystery and a sanctum sanctorum help to elevate and revive idolatry. And is not love the greatest of idolatries?

A virgin is ours a thousand times more than any other woman; she must love us much, or at least she must desire an embrace much, to descend from the pedestal of the idol and come to us; to descend from the altar and tread the vulgar ground of earthly life. And the mystery of the unknown, and the fascination of primitiÆ, and of being the first teacher of the art of love, centuplicate for us the sweet joys of a first embrace. Even the dreadful trepidation of finding the temple violated holds us suspended over the abysses of desperation and voluptuousness, of which, at very short intervals, we sound the somber sorrows, the ineffable delights. And a woman, too, who knows that she is a virgin will fathom the immensity of her sacrifice, and if she has the fortune of finding it equal to the immensity of her affection she feels one of the greatest ecstasies that can vibrate simultaneously nerves and thoughts, senses and sentiments. She had already given her heart and all her affections to her god; today she gives him the seal which attests the possession of her entire self; and divides with her companion all that she has, all that she feels, all that she desires. An angel yesterday, she allows her lover to tear away her wings and becomes again a woman in order to be a wife, a friend, a mother. Priestess of a temple, she burns on the altar of love the niveous robe of the vestal and cries, sobbing with joy and sorrow: "I am thine, all thine! Is there anything more that I can give thee? Tell me and I will give it to thee. I have clipped my wings, that thou mayst carry me aloft on the wings of thy genius; I have burned my temple, that I may live only in the temple of thy heart; I have forsworn the religion of my dreams, that I may be nothing but thy companion. Do not deceive me; I was thy virgin, and I shall be only thy wife. Have an immense love, an immense sympathy for me!"

And yet, we must say it to cause some one who will read these pages to turn pale with animosity, there are men who dare accept the sacrifice of the virgin without any right to be priests of love. And there are men who bite and defile her with the slime of the viper. Miserable, a hundred times miserable wretches! Amidst tears of shame and humiliation, may the woman dream of an infinite adultery; may human dignity, insulted, avenge itself by making the man a cuckold a thousand times; may the profaned virgin reascend to heaven, hurling anathema at the sacrilegious profaner of the temple; may the jury of entire humanity rise with the full majesty of its omnipotence and spit in the face of the enervated who has dared to ask of heaven an angel and of man a virgin, and may a horde of sneering demons scourge him, tie him to the great pillory of ridicule and, in the loudest voice, proclaim him the most dastardly, the last among men!

The anatomical fact which constitutes virginity has, however, the great inconvenience of being understood by all, so that the mass of the people, proud and happy to be able to solve a question of virtue with the eyes and with the hands, brutally throw upon the most delicate scales of the world the sword of Brennus. Let philosophers and sentimentalists prattle at will about purity of heart and the frontiers of virtue; for the common people there are but virgin women or violated women; and physics, with its resistances of elasticity, and geometry with its diameters, solve a problem over which the minds of many thinkers were hard at work. And from this point of view, a large part of civilized men are common people, and many who weep through tenderness of heart and soar very high, stop wondering in the presence of the brutality of a fact, acknowledge defeat and empoison their own lives, thinking that the woman whom they have chosen for their companion had already sacrificed at the altar of love.

Science openly affirms that virginity, even anatomically, has many varied forms, and may be lacking in women who never felt the breath of man. In my medical capacity, I have myself seen, with my own eyes, some little girls who were lacking that seal with which nature seems to consecrate the virgin; and as I contemplated the little creatures I was distressed by the thought that, though having kept virtuous and innocent, virtue would some day be unavailing for them in the presence of an ignorant and brutal man. In vain these poor girls will some day be as pure as an angel. And even when anatomy does not practise such an imposition upon a woman, a fall, a blow, a contortion may, in the most innocent way, break the fragile seal which for many is the only and secure guarantee of virtue and purity. Nor is this all. Often, in early childhood, when vice and libertinism are words unknown in the dictionary of a little girl, the lascivious jest of a too precocious boy, or the posthumous lechery of a wretched old man, may violate the palladium of anatomical virginity without dimming in the slightest degree the mirror of the heart; and later, when the mysteries of love shall be unveiled, the still chaste maiden may feel pure and proud of herself and raise her head high, not knowing that she does not possess the star of physical purity. How many domestic misfortunes have happened in this way! How many first nights of love have become infernal nights, and how many ties have been dissolved by a prejudice, a suspicion, a calumny, when they should have been a garland of the purest and most sublime joys!

How many existences have been cruelly empoisoned through the elasticity of a veil more fleeting than the cloudlet that dissolves under the first rays of the sun!

And all of you, jurors of feminine honesty, who with so much assurance and brutality pass your judgment upon hearts and virginity, have you ever thought of the thousand and one aggressions which a young, beautiful and courted woman must pass through, and that, before becoming a bride, she must struggle with her own ignorance and others' lechery, with the surprises of the senses and with the cunning artifices of lust? A moment of weakness, an instant of morbid curiosity, may dim but not stain the virtue of a woman who can be, before and after, as pure as rock-crystal. No; virginity is a great thing, it is the largest diamond in the crown of youthful virtue; but it is not all the woman, it is not all the virtue.

How many wretched women were never pure except in the maternal womb, and yet with studied lasciviousness and infinite art preserved intact the physical seal of virtue, through the lechery of a hundred lovers, and, full of profound wisdom and prudent libertinage and weary of carnal lust, carried their virginity to the altar of the official first love! Beautiful treasure, indeed! A diamond fallen a hundred times into the mud and a hundred times picked up and washed! Beautiful gem! A piece of flesh preserved pure in a prostituted body; a flower grown on a clod of earth in the midst of a fetid marsh! And men often picked that flower with sacred devotion and kissed it and adored it, perhaps after having hurled an insult at the pure and virtuous girl who lacked only a seal, like a registered letter refused by the post-office clerk because it lacked a drop of sealing-wax. How often have I wept in wrath, listening to mothers teaching their daughters this one dogma of virtue: "Preserve physical virginity!" How often have I cursed modern morals which teach the bride: "Above all, no scandal!" These, then, are the morals of this hypocritical century: "Virgin first, prudent afterward." There is the virtue of woman! An eye on the seal first, an eye to the keyhole later on: such is the perfect woman of our times!

The excessive, brutal and bestial importance given to virginity by modern society has created the infamous art of manufacturing virgins; and many times virginity has had two, five, ten different editions, not all improved, but always correct and revised, while the idiotic mass of husbands and lovers have been tricked into applauding the new virtue, the purest virtue, heaven knows how acquired!

The debasement of this hypocritical time could not be more cynically avenged. Of the virtue of a woman you have an idea utterly physical and chemical. Now, this advanced civilization is all at your service; it manufactures a chemical and physical virginity for your convenience, and calls to its aid some acrobatism, hocus-pocus and natural magic. Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur. Curse, then, the pure and holy woman whose heart is virgin, who never has loved, but to whom the Longobards could never have awarded the prize of the morgincap!

Virginity exists; it exists in the physical nature of the human female, it exists in the sanctuary of civil morals, but it does not begin and end with an anatomical condition: it is also virtue. The anatomical fact must be accompanied by the moral fact; with the purity of which the senses are the judges, we want purity of heart, the adamantine transparency of character. The human virgin, the virgin of the civilized man, is not the virgin of the savage, an oyster that can be opened only with a knife. She is a creature whom no social mud has ever soiled; she is a woman who was loved, perhaps, and desired by many, but who never belonged to any man. She knows no lasciviousness, no art of hiding vice under a shining varnish of virtue; she blushes at an impure word, at a too ardent gesture, at an impertinent pressure of the hand. The virgin knows that she is all intact, because she, too, has had longings and desires, but has never given her heart to any man; she knows that she is pure, because no profane hand has ever penetrated into the sanctuary of her purity. She has not opened any part of her robe, any fissure of her heart, any tabernacle of her treasures. She is white as the snow of the Alps, on which no foot of marten and no wing of insect have ever rested; she is pure as the water which spouts from the granite in a cave never explored by human foot; she knows everything, or is ignorant of everything, but she blushes for wisdom as well as for ignorance, if only her heart pulsates faster at the sight of a man. She is a virgin because she is modest; she is modest because she is a virgin; she is a virgin and modest because she is a woman.

And you, mothers, who were virgins, when you teach your daughters what a treasure virginal purity is, give them, together with a lesson of anatomy and physiology, which perhaps they need, a lesson of high morals. Tell them that to the man they love they should give everything; to the man they do not love, nothing; tell them that a woman can be physically a virgin and a prostitute morally; tell them that to the first kiss they owe all their treasures untouched, not one gem only, and that the future of their love will depend on the preservation of the centuple virginity enclosed in the one virgin as the masses conceive her. If nature, with a sad mystery, has prescribed that woman should love her first love with much pain, it is incumbent on us to crown the virgin with so many flowers of virtue, to scent her with so many perfumes of grace, as to turn a martyr into a happy spouse. It is our task to elevate the physical virgin to a very high region of purity and grandeur, so that she may appear to us like an angel of Beato Angelico, all illumined by the iridescent light of the rainbow, where, amidst tears of a first defeat, should shine the light of the sun of love; and that after the hurricane of conquest there may be announced the bright calm of a day all beauty and delight. The Christian religion, in offering to man a virgin-mother to worship, wished, perhaps, to consecrate the purity of the virgin with the affections of the bride; to create an ideal of perfection in which the two chief virtues of woman should shine; to suggest, perhaps, that one can be a virgin and a mother, as another can be a virgin and a courtesan. That this ideal creature has been a sublime creation of the human mind, and not a riddle or a myth, will be clearly proved by the influence which she has exercised upon Christian art, by gazing at the Madonnas of Raphael, of Murillo and of Correggio.