The man who hastens to tell another man that he has dropped a thousand
franc bill from his pocket-book, or even that the handkerchief is
coming out of his pocket, would think it a mean thing to warn him that
some one was carrying off his wife. There is certainly something
extremely odd in this moral inconsistency, but after all it admits of
explanation. Since the law cannot exercise any interference with
matrimonial rights, the citizens have even less right to constitute
themselves a conjugal police; and when one restores a thousand franc
bill to him who has lost it, he acts under a certain kind of
obligation, founded on the principle which says, “Do unto others as ye
would they should do unto you!”
But by what reasoning can justification be found for the help which one
celibate never asks in vain, but always receives from another celibate
in deceiving a husband, and how shall we qualify the rendering of such
help? A man who is incapable of assisting a gendarme in discovering an
assassin, has no scruple in taking a husband to a theatre, to a concert
or even to a questionable house, in order to help a comrade, whom he
would not hesitate to kill in a duel to-morrow, in keeping an
assignation, the result of which is to introduce into a family a
spurious child, and to rob two brothers of a portion of their fortune
by giving them a co-heir whom they never perhaps would otherwise have
had; or to effect the misery of three human beings. We must confess
that integrity is a very rare virtue, and, very often, the man that
thinks he has most actually has least. Families have been divided by
feuds, and brothers have been murdered, which events would never have
taken place if some friend had refused to perform what passes to the
world as a harmless trick.
It is impossible for a man to be without some hobby or other, and all
of us are devoted either to hunting, fishing, gambling, music, money,
or good eating. Well, your ruling passion will always be an accomplice
in the snare which a lover sets for you, the invisible hand of this
passion will direct your friends, or his, whether they consent or not,
to play a part in the little drama when they want to take you away from
home, or to induce you to leave your wife to the mercy of another. A
lover will spend two whole months, if necessary, in planning the
construction of the mouse-trap.