The baths were another. In the early Roman baths, darkness, or, at best, a

faint twilight reigned; and, besides, not only were the sexes separated,

but old and young men were not allowed to bathe together.[108] But after

Sylla's wars, though there were separate _sudaria_ and _tepidaria_ for the

sexes, they could meet freely in the corridors and chambers, and any

immorality short of actual prostitution could take place.[109] Men and

women, girls and boys, mixed together in a state of perfect nudity, and in

such close proximity that contact could hardly be avoided. Such an

assemblage would obviously be a place of resort for dealers in prostitutes

in search of merchandise. At a later period, cells were attached to the

bath-houses, and young men and women kept on the premises, partly as bath

attendants and partly as prostitutes. After the bath, the bathers, male

and female, were rubbed down, kneaded, and anointed by these attendants.

It would appear that women submitted to have this indecent service

performed for them by men, and that health was not always the object

sought, even by the Roman matrons.[110] Several emperors endeavored to

remedy these frightful immoralities. Hadrian forbade the intermixture of

men and women in the public baths.[111] Similar enactments were made by

Marcus Aurelius and Alexander Severus; but Heliogabalus is said to have

delighted in uniting the sexes, even in the wash-room. As early as the

Augustan era, however, the baths were regarded as little better than

houses of prostitution under a respectable name.[112]

Taverns or houses of entertainment were also in some measure brothels. The

law regarded all servants waiting upon travelers at inns or taverns as

prostitutes.[113] It would appear, also, that butchers', bakers', and

barbers' shops were open to a suspicion of being used for purposes of

prostitution. The plebeian ædiles constantly made it their business to

visit these in search of unregistered prostitutes, though, as might be

expected from the number of delinquents and the very incomplete municipal

police system of Rome, with very little success. The bakers'

establishments, which generally included a flour-mill, were haunted by a

low class of prostitutes to whom allusion has already been made. In the

cellar where the mill stood cells were often constructed, and the ædiles

knew well that all who entered there did not go to buy bread.[114]

Finally, prostitution to a very large extent was carried on in the open

air. The shades of certain statues and temples, such as those of Marsyas,

Pan, Priapus, Venus, etc., were common resorts for prostitutes. It is said

that Julia, the daughter of the Emperor Augustus, prostituted herself

under the shade of a statue of Marsyas. Similar haunts of abandoned women

were the arches of aqueducts, the porticoes of temples, the cavities in

walls, etc. Even the streets in the poorer wards of the city appear to

have been infested by the very lowest class of prostitutes, whose natural

favors had long ceased to be merchantable.[115] It must be borne in mind

that the streets of Rome were not lighted, and that profound darkness

reigned when the moon was clouded over.

HABITS AND MANNERS OF PROSTITUTES.

A grand distinction between Roman and Greek prostitution lies in the

manner in which commerce with prostitutes was viewed in the two

communities. At Athens there was nothing disgraceful in frequenting the

dicterion or keeping an hetaira. At Rome, on the contrary, a married man

who visited a house of ill fame was an _adulter_, and liable to the

penalties of adultery. An habitual frequenter of such places was a

_moechus_ or _scortator_, both of which were terms of scathing reproach.

When Cicero wishes to overwhelm Catiline, he says his followers are

_scortatores_.[116] Until the lowest age of Roman degradation, moreover,

no man of any character entered a house of ill fame without hiding his

face with the skirt of his dress. Even Caligula and Heliogabalus concealed

their faces when they visited the women of the town.[117]

The law prescribed with care the dress of Roman prostitutes, on the

principle that they were to be distinguished in all things from honest

women. Thus they were not allowed to wear the chaste _stola_ which

concealed the form, or the _vitta_ or fillet with which Roman ladies bound

their hair, or to wear shoes (_soccus_), or jewels, or purple robes. These

were the insignia of virtue. Prostitutes wore the _toga_ like men; their

hair, dyed yellow or red, or filled with golden spangles, was dressed in

some Asiatic fashion. They wore sandals with gilt thongs tying over the

instep, and their dress was directed to be of flowered material. In

practice, however, these rules were not strictly observed. Courtesans wore

jewels and purple robes,[118] and not a few boldly concealed their

profligacy under the _stola_. Others, seeking rather to avoid than to

court misapprehension as to their calling, wore the green toga proudly,

and over it the sort of jacket called _amiculum_, which, like the white

sheet of baronial times, was the badge of adultery. Others, again,

preferred the silk and gauze dresses of the East (_sericæ vestes_), which,

according to the expression of a classical writer, "seemed invented to

exhibit more conspicuously what they were intended to hide."[119] Robes of

Tyre were likewise in use, whose texture may be inferred from the name of

"textile vapor" (_ventus textilis_) which they received.

The law strictly prohibited the use of vehicles of any kind to courtesans.

This also was frequently infringed. Under several emperors prostitutes

were seen in open litters in the most public parts of Rome, and others in

litters which closed with curtains, and served the purpose of a

bed-chamber.[120] A law of Domitian imposed heavy penalties on a courtesan

who was seen in a litter.

In the lupanar, of course, rules regarding costume were unheeded.

Prostitutes retained their hair black, but as to the rest of their person

they were governed by their own taste. Nudity appears to have been quite

common, if not the rule. Petronius describes his hero walking in the

street, and seeing from thence naked prostitutes at the doors of the

lupanaria.[121] Some covered their busts with golden stuffs, others veiled

their faces.

It has already been mentioned that the rate of remuneration exacted by the

prostitutes was fixed by themselves, though apparently announced to the

ædile. It is impossible to form any idea of the average amount of this

charge. The lowest classes, as has been mentioned, sold their miserable

favors for about two tenths of a cent; another large class were satisfied

with two cents. The only direct light that is thrown on this branch of the

subject flows from an obscure passage in the strange romance entitled

"Apollonius of Tyre," which is supposed to have been written by a

Christian named Symposius. In that work the capture of a virgin named

Tarsia by a bawd is described. The bawd orders a sign or advertisement to

be hung out, inscribed, "He who deflours Tarsia shall pay half a pound,

afterward she shall be at the public service for a gold piece." The half

pound has been assumed by commentators to mean half a Roman pound of

silver, and to have been worth $30; the gold piece, according to the best

computation, was about equivalent to $4. But whether these figures can be

regarded as an average admits of doubt, even supposing our estimate of the

value of the sums mentioned in the ancient work to be accurate.

The allusion to Tarsia suggests some notice of the practice of the Roman

bawds when they had secured a virgin. It will be found faithfully

described in that old English play, "Pericles, Prince of Tyre," which is

sometimes bound up with Shakspeare's works. When a bawd had purchased a

virgin as a slave, or when, as sometimes happened under the later

emperors, a virgin was handed to him to be prostituted as a punishment for

crime, the door of his house was adorned with twigs of laurel; a lamp of

unusual size was hung out at night, and a tablet exhibited somewhat

similar to the one quoted above, stating that a virgin had been received,

and enumerating her charms with cruel grossness.[122] When a purchaser had

been found and a bargain struck, the unfortunate girl, often a mere child,

was surrendered to his brutality, and the wretch issued from the cell

afterward, to be himself crowned with laurel by the slaves of the

establishment.

Thus far of common prostitutes. Though the Romans had no loose women who

could compare in point of standing, influence, or intellect with the Greek

hetairæ, their highest class of prostitutes, the _famosæ_ or _delicatæ_,

were very far above the unfortunate creatures just described. They were

not inscribed in the ædile's rolls; they haunted no lupanar, or tavern, or

baker's stall; they were not seen lurking about shady spots at night; they

wore no distinguishing costume. It was in broad daylight, at the theatre,

in the streets, in the Via Sacra, which was the favorite resort of

fashionable Rome, that they were to be found, and there they were only to

be distinguished from virtuous matrons by the superior elegance of their

dress, and the swarm of admirers by whom they were surrounded. Indeed,

under the later emperors, the distinction, outward or inward, between

these prostitutes and the Roman matrons appears to have been very slight

indeed.[123] They were surrounded or followed by slaves of either sex, a

favorite waiting-maid being the most usual attendant.[124] Their meaning

glances are frequently the subject of caustic allusions in the Roman

poets.[125] Many of them were foreigners, and expressed themselves by

signs from ignorance of the Latin tongue.

These women were usually the mistresses of rich men, though not

necessarily faithful to their lovers. We possess no such biographies of

them as we have of the Greek hetairæ, nor is there any reason to suppose

that their lives ever formed the theme of serious works, though the Roman

erotic library was rich. What little we know of them we glean mostly from

the verses of Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, Propertius, Catullus, Martial, and

from such works as the Satyricon of Petronius, and the novel of Apuleius,

and that little is hardly worth the knowing.

The first five poets mentioned--Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and

Tibullus--devoted no small portion of their time and talent to the

celebration of their mistresses. But beyond their names, Lydia, Chloe,

Lalage, Lesbia, Cynthia, Delia, Neæra, Corinna, &c., we are taught nothing

about them but what might have been taken for granted, that they were

occasionally beautiful, lascivious, extravagant, often faithless and

heartless. From passages in Ovid, and also in one or two of the others, it

may be inferred that it was not uncommon for these great prostitutes to

have a nominal husband, who undertook the duty of negotiating their

immoral bargains (_leno maritus_).

The only really useful information we derive from these erotic effusions

relates to the poets themselves. All the five we have mentioned moved in

the best society at Rome. Some of them, like Horace, saw their fame

culminate during their lifetime; others filled important stations under

government. Ovid was intimate with the Emperor Augustus, and his exile is

supposed to have been caused by some improper discoveries he made with

regard to the emperor's relations with his daughter. Yet it is quite

evident that all these persons habitually lived with prostitutes, felt no

shame on that account, and recorded unblushingly the charms and exploits

of their mistresses in verses intended to be read indiscriminately by the

Roman youths.

Between Ovid and Martial the distance is immense. Half a century divided

them in point of time; whole ages in tone. During the Augustan era, the

language of poets, though much freer than would be tolerated to-day, was

not invariably coarse. No gross expressions are used by the poets of that

day in addressing their mistresses, and even common prostitutes are

addressed with epithets which a modern lover might apply to his betrothed.

But Martial knows no decency. It may safely be said that his epigrams

ought never again to be translated into a modern tongue. Expressions

designating the most loathsome depravities, and which, happily, have no

equivalent, and need none, in our language, abound in his pages. Pictures

of the most revolting pruriency succeed each other rapidly. In a word,

such language is used and such scenes depicted as would involve the

expulsion of their utterer from any house of ill fame in modern times. Yet

Martial enjoyed high favor under government. He was enabled to procure

the naturalization of many of his Spanish friends. He possessed a country

and a town house, both probably gifts from the emperor. His works, even in

his lifetime, were carefully sought after, not only in Rome, but in Gaul,

Spain, and the other provinces. Upon the character and life of courtesans

in his day he throws but little light. The women whose hideous depravity

he celebrates must have been well known at Rome; their names must have

been familiar to the ears of Roman society. But this feature of Roman

civilization, the notoriety of prostitutes and of their vile arts,

properly belongs to another division of the subject.

ROMAN SOCIETY.

It was often said by the ancients that the more prostitutes there were,

the safer would be virtuous women. "Well done," said the moralist to a

youth entering a house of ill fame; "so shalt thou spare matrons and

maidens." As this idea rests upon a slender substratum of plausibility, it

may be as well to expose its fallacy, which can be done very completely by

a glance at Roman society under the emperors.

Even allowing for poetical exaggeration, it may safely be said that there

is no modern society, perhaps there has never existed any since the fall

of Rome, to which Juvenal's famous satire on women can be applied.[126]

Independently of the unnatural lusts which were so unblushingly avowed,

the picture drawn by the Roman surpasses modern credibility. That it was

faithful to nature and fact, there is, unhappily, too much reason to

believe. The causes must be sought in various directions.

Two marked distinctions between modern and ancient society may at once be

noticed. In no modern civilized society is it allowable to present

immodest images to the eye, or to utter immodest words in the ear of

females or youth. At Rome the contrary was the rule. The walls of

respectable houses were covered with paintings, of which one hardly dares

in our times to mention the subjects. Lascivious frescoes and lewd

sculptures, such as would be seized in any modern country by the police,

filled the halls of the most virtuous Roman citizens and nobles.[127]

Ingenuity had been taxed to the utmost to reproduce certain indecent

objects under new forms.[128] Nor was common indecency adequate to supply

the depraved taste of the Romans. Such groups as satyrs and nymphs, Leda

and the swan, Pasiphæ and the bull, satyrs and she-goats, were abundant.

Some of them have been found, and exhibit a wonderful artistic skill. All

of these were daily exposed to the eyes of children and young girls, who,

as Propertius says, were not allowed to remain novices in any infamy.

Again, though a Horace would use polite expressions in addressing Tyndaris

or Lalage, the Latin tongue was much freer than any modern one. There is

not a Latin author of the best age in whose writings the coarsest words

can not be found. The comedies were frightfully obscene, both in ideas and

expressions. A youth or a maiden could not begin to acquire instruction

without meeting words of the grossest meaning. The convenient adage,

_Charta non erubescit_, was invented to hide the pruriency of authors, and

one of the worst puts in the wretched plea that, "though his page is lewd,

his life is pure." It is quite certain that, whatever might have been the

effect on the poet, his readers could not but be demoralized by the

lewdness of his verses.

Add to these causes of immorality the baths, and a fair case in support of

Juvenal will be already made out. A young Roman girl, with warm southern

blood in her veins, who could gaze on the unveiled pictures of the loves

of Venus, read the shameful epigrams of Martial, or the burning love-songs

of Catullus, go to the baths and see the nudity of scores of men and

women, be touched herself by a hundred lewd hands, as well as those of the

bathers who rubbed her dry and kneaded her limbs--a young girl who could

withstand such experiences and remain virtuous would need, indeed, to be a

miracle of principle and strength of mind.

But even then religion and law remained to assail her. She could not walk

through the streets of Rome without seeing temples raised to the honor of

Venus, that Venus who was the mother of Rome, as the patroness of illicit

pleasures. In every field and in many a square, statues of Priapus, whose

enormous indecency was his chief characteristic, presented themselves to

view, often surrounded by pious matrons in quest of favor from the god.

Once a year, at the Lupercalia, she saw young men running naked through

the streets, armed with thongs with which they struck every woman they

saw; and she noticed that matrons courted this flagellation as a means of

becoming prolific. What she may have known of the Dionysia or Saturnalia,

the wild games in honor of Bacchus, and of those other dissolute festivals

known as the eves of Venus, which were kept in April, it is not easy to

say, but there is no reason to believe that these lewd scenes were

intended only for the vicious, or that they were kept a secret.

When her marriage approached the remains of her modesty were effectually

destroyed. Before marriage she was led to the statue of Mutinus, a nude

sitting figure, and made to sit on his knee,[129] _ut ejus pudicitiam

prius deus delibasse videtur_. This usage was so deeply rooted among the

Romans that, when Augustus destroyed the temple of Mutinus in the Velian

ward in consequence of the immoralities to which it gave rise, a dozen

others soon rose to take its place. On the marriage night, statuettes of

the deities _Subiqus_ and _Prema_ hung over the nuptial bed--_ut subacta a

sponso viro non se commoveat quum premitur_;[130] and in the morning the

jealous husband exacted, by measuring the neck of his bride, proof to his

superstitious mind that she had yielded him her virginity.[131]

In the older age of the republic it was not considered decent for women to

recline on couches at table as men did. This, however soon became quite

common. Men and women lay together on the same couch so close that hardly

room for eating was left. And this was the custom not only with women of

loose morals, but with the most respectable matrons. At the feast of

Trimalchio, which is the best recital of a Roman dinner we have, the wife

of the host and the wife of Habinus both appeared before the guests.

Habinus amused them by seizing his host's wife by the feet and throwing

her forward so that her dress flew up and exposed her knees, and

Trimalchio himself did not blush to show his preference for a giton in the

presence of the company, and to throw a cup at his wife's head when her

jealousy led her to remonstrate.[132] The voyage of the hero of the

Satyricon furnishes other pictures of the intensely depraved feeling which

pervaded Roman society. The author does not seem to admit the possibility

of virtue's existence; all his men and women are equally vicious and

shameless. The open spectacle of the most hideous debauchery only

provokes a laugh. If a man declines to accede to the propositions which

the women are the first to make, it must be because he is a disciple of

the _aversa Venus_, and whole cities are depicted as joining in the hue

and cry after the lost _frater_ of a noted debauchee.

The _commessationes_, which Cicero enumerates among the symptoms of

corruption in his time, had become of universal usage. It was for them

that the cooks of Rome exhausted their art in devising the dishes which

have puzzled modern gastronomists; for them that the rare old wines of

Italy were stowed away in cellars; for them that Egyptian and Ionian

dancing-girls stripped themselves, or donned the _nebula linea_.[133] No

English words can picture the monstrosities which are calmly narrated in

the pages of Petronius and Martial. Well might Juvenal cry, "Vice has

culminated."[134]

It is perhaps difficult to conceive how it could have been otherwise,

considering the examples set by the emperors. It requires no small

research to discover a single character in the long list that was not

stained by the grossest habits. Julius Cæsar, "the bald adulterer," was

commonly said to be "husband of all men's wives."[135] Augustus, whose

youth had been so dissolute as to suggest a most contemptuous epigram,

employed men in his old age to procure matrons and maidens, whom these

purveyors of imperial lust examined as though they had been horses at a

public sale.[136] The amours of Tiberius in his retreat at Capreæ can not

be described. It will suffice to say there was no invention of infamy

which he did not patronise; that no young person of any charms was safe

from his lust. More than one senator felt that safety required he should

remove his handsome wife or pretty daughter from Rome, for Tiberius was

ever ready to avenge obstacles with death. The sad fate of the beautiful

Mallonia, who stabbed herself during a lawsuit which the emperor had

instituted against her because she refused to comply with his beastly

demands, gives a picture of the age.[137] Caligula, who made some changes

in the tax levied on prostitutes, and established a brothel in the palace,

commenced life by debauching his sisters, and ended it by giving grand

dinners, during which he would remove from the room any lady he pleased,

and, after spending a few minutes with her in private, return and give an

account of the interview for the amusement of the company.[138] Messalina

so far eclipsed Claudius in depravity that the "profuse debauches" of the

former appear, by contrast, almost moderate and virtuous.[139]

Nero surpassed his predecessors in cynic recklessness. He was an habitual

frequenter of houses of prostitution. He dined in public at the great

circus among a crowd of prostitutes. He founded, on the shore of the Gulf

of Naples, houses of prostitution, and filled them with females, whose

dissolute habits were their recommendation to his notice. The brief sketch

of his journeys given by Tacitus, and the allusions to his minister of

pleasures, Tigellinus, leave no room for doubting that he was a monster of

depravity.[140]

Passing over a coarse Galba, a profligate Otho, a beastly Vitellius, a

mean Vespasian, and a dissolute Titus, Domitian revived the age of Nero.

He seduced his brother's daughter, and carried her away from her husband,

bathed habitually in company with a band of prostitutes, and set an

example of hideous vice while enacting severe laws against debauchery.

After another interval, Commodus converted the palace into a house of

prostitution. He kept in his pay three hundred girls of great beauty, and

as many youths, and revived his dull senses by the sight of pleasures he

could no longer share. Like Nero, he violated his sisters; like him, he

assumed the dress and functions of a female, and gratified the court with

the spectacle of his marriage to one of his freedmen. Finally, Elagabalus,

whom the historian could only compare to a wild beast, surpassed even the

most audacious infamies of his predecessors. It was his pride to have been

able to teach even the most expert courtesans of Rome something more than

they knew; his pleasure to wallow among them naked, and to pull down into

the sink of bestiality in which he lived the first officers of the empire.

When such was the example set by men in high places, there is no need of

inquiring farther into the condition of the public morals. A censor like

Tacitus might indignantly reprove, but a Martial--and he was, no doubt, a

better exponent of public and social life than the stern historian--would

only laugh, and copy the model before him. It may safely be asserted that

there does not exist in any modern language a piece of writing which

indicates so hopelessly depraved a state of morals as Martial's epigram

on his wife.

SECRET DISEASES AT ROME.

At what period, and where, venereal diseases first made their appearance,

is a matter of doubt. It was long the opinion of the faculty that they

were of modern origin, and that Europe had derived them from America,

where the sailors of Columbus had first contracted them. This opinion does

not appear to rest on any solid basis, and is now generally rejected. The

fact is, that the venereal disease prevailed extensively in Europe in the

fifteenth century; but the presumption, from an imposing mass of

circumstantial evidence, is that it has afflicted humanity from the

beginning of history.

Still, it is strange that Greek and Latin authors do not mention it. There

is a passage in Juvenal in which allusion is made to a disgusting disease,

which appears to bear resemblance to venereal disease. Epigrams of Martial

hint at something of the same kind. Celsus describes several diseases of

the generative organs, but none of these authors ascribe the diseases they

mention to venereal intercourse.

Celsus prefaces what he says on the subject of this class of maladies with

an apology. Nothing but a sense of duty has led him to allude to matters

so delicate; but he feels that he ought not to allow his country to lose

the benefit of his experience, and he conceives it to be "desirable to

disseminate among the people some medical principles with regard to a

class of diseases which are never revealed to any one."

After this apology, he proceeds to speak of a disease which he calls

_inflammatio colis_, which seems to have borne a striking analogy to the

modern _Phymosis_. It has been supposed that the _Elephantiasis_, which he

describes at length, was also of a syphilitic character; and the symptoms

detailed by Aretous, who wrote in the latter half of the first century,

certainly remind the reader of secondary syphilis; but the best opinion of

to-day appears to be that the diseases are distinct and unconnected.

Women afflicted with secret diseases were called _aucunnuentæ_, which

explains itself. They prayed to Juno Fluonia for relief, and used the

_aster atticus_ by way of medicine. The Greek term for this herb being

_Bonbornion_, which the Romans converted into _Bubonium_, that word came

to be applied to the disease for which it was given, whether in the case

of females or males. Modern science has obtained thence the term Bubo. The

Romans said of a female who communicated a disease to a man, _Hæc te

imbubinat_.[141]

We find, moreover, in the later writers, allusions to the _morbus

campanus_, the _clazomenæ_, the _rubigo_, etc., which were all secret

diseases of a type, if not syphilitic, strongly resembling it. It must be

admitted, however, that no passage in the ancient writers directly

ascribes these diseases to commerce with prostitutes.

Roman doctors declined to treat secret diseases. They were called by the

generic term _morbus indecens_, and it was considered unbecoming to

confess to them or to treat them. Rich men owned a slave doctor who was in

the confidence of the family, and to whom such delicate secrets would

naturally be confided. But the mass of the people were restrained by shame

from communicating their misfortunes; as was the case among the Jews, the

unhappy patient was driven to seclusion as the only remedy. However cruel

and senseless this practice may have been as regarded the sufferer, it was

of service to the people, as it prevented, in some degree, the spread of

contagion.

Up to the period of the civil wars, and perhaps as late as the Christian

era, the only physicians at Rome were drug-sellers, enchanters, and

midwives. The standing of the former may be inferred from a passage in

Horace, where he classes them with the lowest outcasts of Roman

society.[142] The enchanters (_sagæ_) made philtres to produce or impede

the sensual appetite. They were execrated, and even so amorous a poet as

Ovid felt bound to warn young girls against the evil effects of the

aphrodisiacs they concocted.[143] Midwives also made philtres, and are

often confounded with the _sagæ_. The healing science of the three classes

must have been small.

About the reign of Augustus, Greek physicians began to settle at Rome.

They possessed much theory, and some practical experience, as the Treatise

of Celsus shows, and soon became an important class in Roman society. It

was not, however, till the reign of Nero, that an office of public

physician was created. Under that emperor, a Greek named Andromachus was

appointed _archiater_, or court physician, and _archiatii populares_ were

soon afterward appointed for the people. They were allowed to receive

money from the rich, but they were bound, in consideration of various

privileges bestowed on their office, to treat the poor gratuitously. They

were stationed in every city in the empire. Rome had fourteen, besides

those attached to the Vestals, the Gymnasia, and the court; other large

cities had ten, and so on, down to the small towns which had one or

two.[144] From the duties and privileges of the _archiatii_, it would

appear they were subject to the ædiles.

It may seem almost superfluous to add that no careful medical reader of

the history of Rome under the empire can doubt but the archiatii filled no

sinecure, and that a large proportion of the diseases they treated were

directly traceable to prostitution.

CHAPTER V.

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN ERA.

Christian Teachers preach Chastity.--Horrible Punishment of Christian

Virgins.--Persecution of Women.--Conversion of Prostitutes.--The

Gnostics.--The Ascetics.--Conventual Life.--Opinion of the Fathers on

Prostitution.--Tax on Prostitutes.--Punishment of Prostitutes under

the Greek Emperors.

Perhaps the most marked originality of the Christian doctrine was the

stress it laid on chastity. It has been well remarked that even the most

austere of the pagan moralists recommended chastity on _economical_

grounds alone. The apostles exacted it as a moral and religious duty. They

preached against lewdness as fervently as against heathenism. Not one of

the epistles contained in the New Testament but inveighs, in the strongest

language, against the vices classed under the generic head of luxury. Nor

can it be doubted that, under divine Providence, the obvious merit of this

feature in the new religion exercised a large influence in rallying the

better class of minds to its support.

From the first, the Christian communities made a just boast of the purity

of their morals. Their adversaries met them on this ground at great

disadvantage. It was notorious that the college of Vestals had been

sustained with great difficulty. Latterly, it had been found necessary to

supply vacancies with children, and even under these circumstances, the

number of Vestals buried alive bore but a very small proportion to the

number who had incurred this dread penalty. Nor could it be denied that

the chastity of the Roman virgins was, at best, but partial, the purest

among them being accustomed to unchaste language and unchaste sights. The

Christian congregations, on the contrary, contained numbers of virgins who

had devoted themselves to celibacy for the love of Christ. They were

modest in their dress, decorous in their manners, chaste in their

speech.[145] They refused to attend the theatres; lived frugally and

temperately; allowed no dancers at their banquets; used no perfumes, and

abstained generally from every practice which could endanger their

rigorous continence.[146] Marriage among the Christians was a holy

institution, whose sole end was the procreation of children. It was not to

be used, as was the case too often among the heathen, as a cloak for

immoralities. Christ, they said, permitted marriage, but did not permit

luxury.[147] The early fathers imposed severe penitences on fornication,

adultery, and other varieties of sensuality.

Persecution aided the Church in the great work of purifying public morals,

by forcing it to keep in view the Christian distinction between moral and

physical guilt. At what time it became usual to condemn Christian virgins

to the brothel it is difficult to discover. The practice may have arisen

from the hideous custom which enjoined the violation of Roman maidens

before execution, if the existence of such a custom can be assumed on the

authority of so loose a chronicler as Suetonius.[148] However this be,

this horrible refinement of brutality was in use in the time of Marcus

Aurelius.[149] Virgins were seized and required to sacrifice to idols.

Refusing, they were dragged, often naked, through the streets to a

brothel, and there abandoned to the lubricity of the populace. The piety

of the early Christians prompted the belief that on many conspicuous

occasions the Almighty had interfered to protect his chosen children in

this dire calamity.[150] St. Agnes, having refused to sacrifice to Vesta,

was said to have been stripped naked by the order of the prefect; but, no

sooner had her garments fallen, than her hair grew miraculously, and

enveloped her as in a shroud. Dragged to the brothel, a wonderful light

shone from her body, and the by-standers, appalled at the sight, instead

of offering her violence, fell at her knees, till, at last, the prefect's

son, bolder and more reckless than the others, advanced to consummate her

sentence, and was struck dead at her feet by a thunderbolt.[151]

Theodora, a noble lady of Alexandria, was equally undaunted and equally

faithful to her creed. The judge allowed her three days to deliberate,

warning her of the consequences of obstinacy. She was firm, and was led

into a house of prostitution. There, in the midst of debauched persons of

both sexes, she prayed to God for help, and the sight of the half-naked

virgin bent in fervent prayer struck awe into the minds of the people. At

last a soldier declared that he would fulfill the judgment. Thrust into a

cell with Theodora, he confessed that he was a Christian, dressed her in

his clothes, and enabled her to escape. He was seized and executed; but

the Christian virgin, refusing to purchase her safety at such a price,

gave herself up, and died with him.[152] Similar stories are contained in

several of the Christian fathers.[153]

There is, unhappily, no reason to doubt that in many instances the brutal

mandate of the pagan judges was rigorously executed, and that the faith of

many Christian virgins was assailed through the channel of their virtue.

This appears to have been frequently the case during the persecution of

Diocletian, when we hear of Christian women being suspended naked by one

foot, and tortured in other savage and infernal ways. The practice led to

the clear enunciation of the important doctrine of moral chastity, already

stated by Christ himself in the Gospel. The Romans could not conceive a

chaste soul in a body that had endured pollution, and hence for Lucretia

there was no resource but the poniard. It was left for St. Augustin, St.

Jerome, and the other fathers, to assert boldly that the crime lay in the

intention and not in the act; that a chaste heart might inhabit a body

which brutal force had soiled; and that the Christian virgins whom an

infamous judge had sentenced to the brothel were none the less acceptable

servants of God.[154]

The only retaliation attempted by the early Christians was the conversion

of prostitutes. The works of the fathers contain many narratives of

remarkable conversions of this character, and a learned Jesuit once

compiled a voluminous work on the subject. The Egyptian Mary was the type

of the class. She confessed to Zosimus that she had spent seventeen years

in the practice of prostitution at Alexandria. Her heart being opened, she

took ship for Jerusalem, paid her passage by exercising her calling on

board, and expiated her sins by a life of penitence in the woods of

Judæa. She lived, the legend said, forty-seven years in the woods, naked

and alone, without seeing a man. A chapel was built at Paris during the

Middle Ages in her honor. The painted windows, representing her in the

exercise of her calling on shipboard, were in existence at a very late

period.[155]

In revenge for the victories of the Christians, the pagans accused them of

committing the grossest immoralities. For many centuries the early

Christian congregations met under circumstances of great difficulty, in

secret hiding-places, in catacombs. Their religious rites were performed

mysteriously. Lights were often extinguished to foil the object of spies

and informers. These peculiarities served as the pretext for many obvious

calumnies. It was commonly believed, even by men of the calibre of

Tacitus, that the Christian rites bore strong resemblances to those rites

of Isis which, at an early period of Roman history, had created such alarm

and horror at Rome. Nor were these calumnies confined to the heathen. In

the third and fourth centuries, when sectarian rivalries menaced the

destruction of the Church, similar accusations were freely bandied. That

they were wholly unfounded in every case seems difficult to believe, in

the face of the clear statements of such writers as Epiphanes. What the

precise doctrines of the various sects called Adamites, Cainites,

Nicolaites, and some subdivisions of Gnostics, may have been, it were

perhaps superfluous now to inquire; but it seems not unreasonable to

suppose that, in some instances, men of depraved instincts may have

availed themselves of the cloak of Christianity to conceal the

gratification of sensual habits; or, on the other hand, that minds in a

state of religious exaltation may have stumbled upon impurities in the

search for the state of nature. In comparatively late times we have seen,

in America as well as Savoy, a few persons of weak minds give way to

religious enthusiasm in a manner that warred with public decency. Similar

aberrations may have been more frequent during the seething era which

preceded the establishment of Christianity, and prostitution, in some

shape or other, may have again become a religious rite in certain deluded

or knavish sects. Nor was it unnatural, unjust though it certainly was,

for the heathen to charge Christianity at large with the vices of those of

its followers who worshiped in a state of nudity, and accompanied prayer

with promiscuous intercourse.[156]

Even in the bosom of the true Church practices would break out from time

to time which jarred sadly with the moral theory of the Apostles. Many

persons of both sexes, under the influence of religious enthusiasm, sought

relief for their troubled souls in solitude, and unwisely attempted to

mortify the flesh by practices which too often sharpened the appetites.

One only needs to read the eloquent effusions of St. Jerome to become

satisfied that the course of life adopted by many early Christian

recluses, of both sexes, must have led unwittingly to moral aberrations.

Young men and young women, devoting themselves to a life of seclusion in

the woods, living like wild beasts, without clothing and without shame,

would naturally revive the system of religious prostitution in a more or

less modified shape. On the other hand, in many parts of Europe, Christian

churches thought it not unsafe to accept the legacies of the heathen

religions in the shapes of idols, forms, and ceremonies. Saints succeeded

to the honors of gods; dances in honor of Venus became dances in honor of

the Virgin; statues which were originally intended to represent heathen

deities were saved from destruction by being adopted as fair

representations of Christian saints. Until very recent times there

existed, in various parts of Europe, statues of Priapus, under the name of

some saint, retaining the indecency of the idol, and associated with the

belief of some simple women that the image possessed the power assigned it

in mythology. In processions, during the third and fourth centuries,

sacred virgins were seen to wear round their necks the obscene symbol of

the old worship, and in places the holy bread retained the shape of the

Roman _coliphia_ and _siligines_. St. John Chrysostom complains that in

places he designates, women were baptized in a state of nature, without

even being permitted to veil their sex.[157] A majority of Christian

teachers, unwilling to deprive the masses of a superstitious convenience

afforded them by paganism, allowed them to pray to certain saints not only

for fertility, but for the removal of impotence from husbands and

lovers.[158]

To these immoral features must be added occasional instances of looseness

in conventual life. The preamble of various edicts in France and elsewhere

leaves no room to doubt that, in several instances, immoral persons had

assumed the religious garb, and collected themselves together in religious

communities for the purpose of gratifying sensuality.

These were the aids Christianity afforded to prostitution in its various

forms. They are a mere trifle in comparison with the obstacles it threw in

its way. Independently of the effect produced by the moral teaching of St.

Paul and the Apostles, the rising power of the Church was vigorously

exerted to modify the legislation both of the Eastern and Western empires

on the subject of sexual depravities.

The fathers did not uniformly proscribe prostitution. Saint Augustin said,

"Suppress prostitution, and capricious lusts will overthrow society."[159]

Jerome recognized prostitution, and argued that, as Mary Magdalene had

been saved, so might any prostitute who repented.[160] The canons of the

apostles excluded from the ministry all persons who were convicted of

having commerce with prostitutes, and excommunicated those who were guilty

of rape, but they passed no general sentence on prostitutes.[161] But the

apostolic constitution branded as sinful any sexual intercourse _quæ non

adhibetur ad generationem filiorum sed tota ad voluptatem spectat_.[162]

The same principle is asserted in various passages of the work; wine being

denounced as a provocation to impurity, and the faithful are warned

against the society of lewd persons (_scortatores_). The Council of Elvira

pronounced the penalty of excommunication against bawds and prostitutes,

but it expressly commanded priests to receive at the communion-table

prostitutes who had married Christians.[163] St. Augustin conceived that

no church should admit prostitutes to the altar till they had abandoned

the calling.[164] A similar doctrine was expressed by the Council of

Toledo. At a later period, as we advance in mediæval history, we find the

councils recognizing prostitution, and prostitutes as a class. In 1431, at

the Council of Basle, a holy father presented a paper on the subject of

prostitution, in which it was implied to be the only safeguard of good

morals. A century later, the Council of Milan took especial pains to

identify prostitutes as a class. They were to wear a distinctive dress,

with no ornaments of gold, silver, or silk; to reside in places expressly

designated by the bishops, at a distance from cathedrals; to avoid taverns

and hostelries. The execution of the decree was intrusted to the bishops

and the civil magistrates.[165]

The _vectigal_ or tax paid by all persons subsisting by prostitution was

exacted by the emperors, from Caligula to Theodosius. It was usually

collected every five years. Zosimus accuses Constantine of having enlarged

and remodeled the tax, but apparently without foundation. The early

Christians made it a subject of reproach to the emperors.[166] In

consequence of their assaults, Theodosius abandoned that portion of the

law which laid a tax on bawds, leaving the tax on prostitutes. The latter

was levied as rigorously as ever. A contemporary writer describes the

imperial agents hunting for prostitutes in taverns and houses of

prostitution, and forcing them to purchase, by payment of the tax, the

right of pursuing their calling.[167] At length, in the fifth century,

prostitution and the tax on prostitutes, or _chrysarguron_, were formally

abolished by the Emperor Anastasius I., and the records and rolls of the

collectors burned. It is said that some time afterward, the emperor gave

out that he had repented of what he had done, and desired to see the

_chrysarguron_ re-established. The announcement gave great joy to the

debauchees, and numbers of persons prepared to avail themselves of the

re-enactment of the law. The emperor let it be known that he desired to

have matters placed, so far as could be, on their old footing, and would

therefore desire to collect as many as possible of the old rolls and

records. They were gathered together at all parts, and laid at the

imperial feet. Notice was then given to the people to meet at the circus

on a given day; when they were all assembled, the whole collection of

documents was burned, amid the frantic applause of the populace.[168]

It has been asserted, however, that the _chrysarguron_ was revived

subsequently, and was levied under Justinian. That legislator altered the

old Roman laws regarding prostitution, and relieved prostitutes from the

ineffaceable ban of infamy which the republican jurisprudence had laid on

them. He permitted the marriage of citizens with prostitutes, and

encouraged it by his example. His own wife, the Empress Theodora, had been

a ballet-dancer and a prostitute. When she attained the imperial dignity,

her first thought was of her old companions. She built a magnificent

palace-prison on the south shore of the Bosphorus, and in one night caused

five hundred prostitutes in Constantinople to be seized and conveyed

thither. They were kindly treated; their every wish was gratified; but no

man entered their asylum. The experiment was a complete failure. Most of

the girls committed suicide in their despair, and the remainder soon died

of _ennui_ and vexation.

Theodosius had laid heavy penalties on brothel-keepers;[169] Justinian

reiterated them, and increased their weight. The seizure and prostitution

of a girl he punished with death. He who connived at the prostitution of

females was to be expelled from the city where he lived, and any person

harboring him was to be fined one hundred gold pieces. Whatever

legislation could effect to uproot the system of procurers and public

prostitution, Justinian did;[170] but his laws contain no trace of any

harsh policy toward prostitutes. Those unfortunate creatures he regarded

with an indulgent humanity, which, for the sake of human nature, one may

perhaps ascribe to the kindly sympathy of the empress.

CHAPTER VI.

FRANCE.--HISTORY DURING THE MIDDLE AGES.

Morals in Gaul.--Gynecea.--Capitulary of Charlemagne.--Morals in the

Middle Ages.--Edict of 1254.--Decree of 1358, re-establishing

Prostitution.--Roi des Ribauds.--Ordinance of Philip abolishing

Prostitution.--Sumptuary Laws.--Punishment of Procuresses.--

Templars.--The Provinces.--Prohibition in the North.--Licensed

Brothels at Toulouse, Montpellier, and Avignon.--Penalties South.--

Effect of Chivalry.--Literature.--Erotic Vocabulary.--Incubes and

Succubes.--Sorcery.--The Sabat.--Flagellants.--Adamites.--Jour des

Innocents.--Wedding Ceremonies.--Preachers of the Day.

The Roman accounts of the Gauls represent them as leading virtuous lives.

_Severa matrimonia_ is the expression of the historian. This would appear

to apply more particularly to the women than the men. As is usually the

case among semi-civilized nations, the Gauls, Germans, Franks, and most of

the aboriginal nations of Northern Europe imposed upon the women

obligations of chastity which they did not always accept for themselves.

Adultery, and, in certain cases, fornication, they punished capitally;

but, if the early ecclesiastical writers are to be believed, these rude

warriors were addicted to coarse debaucheries, in which intoxicating

liquors and promiscuous intercourse with females played a prominent part.

The feasts which followed victories in the field, or commemorated national

anniversaries, bore some resemblance to the Roman _commessationes_,

though, of course, they lacked the refinement and the wit which

occasionally strove to redeem those disgraceful banquets. So far as the

females were concerned, there is no doubt the Roman writers judged

correctly. Whether the severity of the climate tempered the ardor of

northern sensuality, or the harshness of the law kept the passions in

check, the female population of Gaul, from the time of the Roman conquest

for at least two or three centuries, was undoubtedly virtuous.

Prostitution was comparatively unknown. An old law or usage directed that

prostitutes should be stoned, but we do not hear of this law being carried

into effect.

Simultaneously with the consolidation of the kingdom of the Franks, we

note that concubinage was an established institution, recognized by the

law and sanctioned by the Church. All the Frank chiefs who could afford

the luxury kept harems, or, as they were called in that day, _gynecea_,

peopled by young girls who ministered to their pleasures. The plan, as it

appears, bore some resemblance to that which is at present in use in

Turkey and some other Mohammedan countries. The chief had one lawful and

proper wife, a sort of _sultana valide_, and other wives whose matrimonial

rights were less clearly defined, but still whose condition was not

necessarily disreputable. How the people lived we are not so well

qualified to say, but no doubt prostitution prevailed to some extent among

them, though in all probability the public morals were purer than they

became toward the tenth and eleventh centuries.

Perhaps the first authentic legislative notice of prostitution in France

is to be found in the Capitularies of Charlemagne. That monarch, who seems

to have seen no mischief in the system of _gynecea_, was severe upon

common prostitution. He directed vulgar prostitutes to be scourged, and a

like penalty to be inflicted on all who harbored them, kept houses of

debauch, or lent their assistance to prostitutes or debauchees. In other

words, Charlemagne treated the same act as a crime among the poor, and as

an excusable habit among the rich.

Our information regarding society in the Middle Ages is necessarily

obscure and scanty, but we have enough to learn that immorality prevailed

to an alarming degree during the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth

centuries. Probably the rich men who had their _gynecea_ were the most

virtuous class in the nation. Most of the kings set an example of loose

intercourse with the ladies of the court. The armies of the time were

noted for the ravages they committed among the female population of the

countries where they were quartered. Both of these classes seem to have

yielded the palm of debauchery to the clergy. It is a fact well known to

antiquaries, though visual evidence of it is becoming scarce, that most of

the great works of Gothic architecture which date from this period were

profusely adorned with lewd sculptures whose subjects were taken from the

religious orders. In one place a monk was represented in carnal connection

with a female devotee. In others were seen an abbot engaged with nuns, a

naked nun worried by monkeys, youthful penitents undergoing flagellation

at the hands of their confessor, lady abbesses offering hospitality to

well-proportioned strangers, etc., etc. These obscene works of art

formerly encumbered the doors, windows, arches, and niches of many of the

finest Gothic cathedrals in France. Modesty has lately insisted on their

removal, but many of the works themselves have been rescued from

destruction by the zeal of antiquaries, and it is believed some have still

escaped the iconoclastic hand of the modern Church. When such was the

condition of the clergy, and such the notoriety of that condition, it

would be unjustifiable to expect purity of morals among the people.

Louis VIII. made an effort to regulate prostitution. It proved fruitless,

and it was left to the next king of the same name, Louis IX., to make the

first serious endeavor to check the progress of the evil in France. His

edict, which dates from 1254, directed that all prostitutes, and persons

making a living indirectly out of prostitution, such as brothel-keepers

and procurers, should be forthwith exiled from the kingdom. It was

partially put in force. A large number of unfortunate females were seized,

and imprisoned or sent across the frontier. Severe punishments were

inflicted on those who returned to the city of Paris after their

expulsion. A panic seized the customers of brothels, and for a few months

public decency was restored. But the inevitable consequences of the

arbitrary decree of the king soon began to be felt. Though the officers of

justice had forcibly confined in establishments resembling Magdalen

hospitals a large proportion of the most notorious prostitutes, and exiled

many more, others arose to take their places. _A clandestine traffic

succeeded to the former open debauchery_, and in the dark the evils of the

disease were necessarily aggravated. More than that, as has usually been

the case when prostitution has been violently and suddenly suppressed,

the number of virtuous women became less, and corruption invaded the

family circle. Tradesmen complained that since the passage of the

ordinance they found it impossible to guard the virtue of their wives and

daughters against the enterprises of the military and the students.

At last, complaints of the evil effects of the ordinance became so general

and so pressing that, after a lapse of two years, it was repealed. A new

royal decree re-established prostitution under rules which, though not

particularly enlightened or humane, still placed it on a sounder footing

than it had occupied before the royal attention had been directed to the

subject. Prostitutes were forbidden to live in certain parts of the city

of Paris, were not allowed to wear jewelry or fine stuffs, and were placed

under the direct supervision of a police magistrate, whose official or

popular title was _Le roi des ribauds_ (the king of ribaldry). The duties

of this officer appear to have been analogous to those of the Roman ædiles

who had charge of prostitution. He was empowered to arrest and confine

females who infringed the law, either in their dress, their domicil, or

their behavior. It was afterward urged against the maintenance of the

office of _Roi des ribauds_ that it was usually filled by reckless,

depraved men, who discharged its duties more in view of their private

interests and the gratification of their sensuality than from regard to

the public morals. Instances of gross tyranny were proved against them,

and, in the absence of evidence to show that their appointment had been

beneficial to the public, but little regret was felt when the office was

abolished by Francis I.

To return to Louis IX. In his old age he repented of what he had done, and

returned to the spirit of his early ordinance. In his instructions to his

son and successor, he adjured him to remove from his country the shameful

stain of prostitution, and indicated plainly enough that the best mode of

attaining that end would be by re-enacting the ordinance of 1254. Philip

dutifully fulfilled his father's request. Prostitution was again declared

a legal misdemeanor, and a formidable array of penalties was again brought

to bear against offending females and their accomplices. But, like many a

legislative act in more modern times, Philip's ordinance was too obviously

at variance with public policy and popular sentiment to be carried into

effect. It was quietly allowed to remain a dead letter, and, with probably

few exceptions, the prostitutes of Paris pursued their calling

unmolested.

A few years afterward, its nullification was authoritatively sanctioned by

fresh sumptuary laws. A royal edict directed courtesans to wear a

shoulder-knot of a particular color as a badge of their calling. The whole

force of the government was rallied to enforce this rule, and also those

which had been enacted by Louis IX. The records of the court contain

innumerable reports of the arrests of prostitutes for violating these

enactments. When they had taken up their abode in a prohibited street,

they were imprisoned and dislodged; when their offense was wearing

unlawful garments or jewelry, the forbidden objects were seized and sold,

the constable apparently sharing the proceeds of the sale. Pimps and

procurers were dealt with more severely. As usual, the statute-book

contained a variety of conflicting enactments on this subject, and menaced

them with all kinds of penalties, from burning alive to fine and

imprisonment. It appears beyond a doubt that, during the thirteenth and

fourteenth centuries, several notorious procuresses were burned alive at

Paris. Others were put in the pillory; were scourged, and had their ears

cropped; while many of the richer class escaped with a fine. There are

records of cases in which the procuress was exposed naked to the insults

of the mob for a whole day, and toward evening the hair on her body was

burned off with a flaming torch. Others again were chased through the city

in a state of nudity, and pelted with stones. These barbarous penalties

appear to have been very much to the taste of the people. Procuresses have

always been an odious class, and it is not surprising to find that the

punishment of a notorious wretch of the class was observed as a joyous

holiday by the populace of the French capital. On the other hand, the

prostitutes themselves were often subjects of public sympathy.

Peculiar reasons operated at this period to produce a favorable sentiment

with regard to prostitutes. The horrible depravities of the Templars were

becoming known. Society was horror-struck at the symptom of a revival of

the worst vice of the ancients. There have been, as is known, ingenious

and eloquent efforts made, in comparatively recent times, to throw a veil

over the corruptions of the Templars, and to prove that they fell victims

to royal jealousy, but the argument is not sustained by the facts.

Documents on whose authenticity and credibility no possible suspicion can

be cast, establish incontrovertibly that the sect of the Templars was

tainted with unnatural vices, and that one of the chief secrets of its

maintenance was the facility it afforded to debased men for the

gratification of monstrous propensities. That this was the opinion which

prevailed in Paris at the time of the outburst which finally led to the

suppression of the order, there is no room to question. It is easy to

understand how the horror such discoveries must have awakened would lead

men to entertain more lenient views with regard to a vice which had at

least the merit of being in conformity with natural instinct.

Thus far of Paris only. During the Middle Ages, as is well known, most of

the provinces of France were self-governing communities, which

administered their own affairs, and received no police regulations from

the crown. A complete examination of the subject throughout France would

therefore involve as many histories as there were provinces. Our space, of

course, forbids any thing of the kind, and we can only glance at leading

divisions.

Most of the northern people had adopted, partly from the old Germanic

constitutions and partly from the Roman law, severe provisions against

prostitution, but they were nowhere, apparently, put in force.

Occasionally a notorious brothel-keeper or professional procuress was

severely punished, but prostitutes were rarely molested. In the north and

west of France, indeed, toleration was obviously the natural policy, for

we are not led to believe that in that section of country the evil was

ever carried to great excess. In Normandy, Brittany, Picardy, and the

great northern and western provinces, a virtuous simplicity was the rule

of life among the peasants, and even the cities did not present any

striking contrast. In many provinces, usage, not fortified by the text of

any custom, allowed the seigneur to levy toll upon prostitutes exercising

their calling within the limits of his jurisdiction. Some old titles and

records refer to this practice. One sets down the tax paid by each

prostitute at four _deniers_ to the seigneur. Others intimate that the tax

may be paid in money or in kind, at the option of the seigneur. In many

seigniories this singular tax was regarded with the contempt it deserved.

In the south of France we meet with a different spectacle. There

prostitution had long been a deeply-seated feature of society. The warm

passions of the southerners required a vent, and, in the absence of some

safety-valve, it was obvious to all that the ungovernable lusts of the men

would soon kindle the inflammable passions of the dark southern women.

Public houses of prostitution were therefore established in three of the

largest cities of the south--Toulouse, Avignon, and Montpellier.

That of Toulouse was established by royal charter, which declared that the

profits of the enterprise should be shared equally by the city and the

University. The building appropriated for the purpose was large and

commodious, bearing the name of the _Grand Abbaye_. In it were lodged not

only the resident prostitutes of the city, but any loose women who

traveled that way, and desired to exercise their impure calling. It would

appear that they received a salary from the city, and that the fees

exacted from the customers were divided between the two public bodies to

which the enterprise was granted. They were obliged to wear white scarfs

and white ribbons or cords on one of their arms, as a badge of their

calling.

When the unfortunate monarch Charles VI. visited Toulouse, the prostitutes

of the Abbaye met him in a body, and presented an address. The king

received them graciously, and promised to grant them whatever largess they

should request. They begged to be released from the duty of wearing the

white badges, and the king, faithful to his promise, granted the boon. A

royal declaration specially exempted them from the old rule.[171] But the

people of Toulouse, no doubt irritated by the want of some distinguishing

mark between their wives and daughters and the "foolish women," by common

consent mobbed the prostitutes who availed themselves of the king's

ordinance. None of them could venture to appear in public without being

liable to insult, and even bodily injury. Resolutely bent on carrying

their point, the women shut themselves up in the Abbaye, and did their

best to keep customers at a distance. Their calculation was just; the city

and the University soon felt the effects of the diminution of visitors at

the Abbaye. The corporation appealed to the king; and when, during the

disorders which distracted France at that time, Charles VII. visited

Toulouse, a formal petition was presented to him by the _capitones_,

praying that he would take such steps as his wisdom might seem fit to

mediate between the prostitutes and the people, and restore to the Abbaye

its former prosperity. The king acted with energy. He denounced the

assailants of the prostitutes in the severest language, and planted his

own royal _fleurs de lis_ over the door of the Abbaye as a protection to

the occupants.[172] But the people did not respect the royal arms any more

than they did the "foolish women." On the contrary, assaults on the

Abbaye became more numerous than ever. The prostitutes complained

incessantly of having suffered violence at the hands of wild youths who

refused to pay for their pleasures; and the civic authorities proving

incompetent to check the disorder, the prostitutes found themselves

compelled to seek refuge in a new part of the city, where, it is to be

presumed, they enlisted adequate support among their own individual

acquaintances. For a hundred years they inhabited their new domicil in

peace and quiet. The University then dislodging them in order to occupy

the spot, the city built them a new abbaye beyond the precincts of the

respectable wards. It was called the _Chateau vert_, and its fame and

profits equaled that of the old abbaye.

About the middle of the sixteenth century the city yielded to the scruples

of some moralists of the day, and ceded the revenues of the Chateau vert

to the hospitals; but the grant being made on condition that the hospitals

should receive and cure all females attacked by venereal disease, it was

found, after six years' trial, that it cost more than it yielded. The

hospitals surrendered the chateau to the city. It happened, just at this

time, that many eminent philosophers and economists were advocating a

return to the old ecclesiastical policy of suppressing prostitution

altogether. After a discussion which lasted several years, the city of

Toulouse adopted these views, and closed the Chateau vert. A magistrate,

high in authority, left on record his protest against this course, founded

on the scenes of immorality he had himself witnessed in the suburbs, and

the country in the neighborhood of Toulouse; but the city authorities

adhered to their opinion, and contented themselves with arresting some of

the most shameless of the free prostitutes.[173] From that time forth,

prostitution at Toulouse was subject to the same rules as in the rest of

France.

The history of prostitution at Montpellier was analogous. At an early

period, the monopoly which the crown had granted to the city being farmed

out to individuals, fell into the hands of two bankers, in whose family it

remained for several generations. During their tenure, a brothel was

established in the city by a speculator of the day, but the holders of the

monopoly prosecuted him, and obtained a perpetual injunction restraining

him from lodging or harboring prostitutes.

At Avignon prostitution was legalized by Jane of Naples just before the

cession of the city to the Pope. The ordinance establishing a public

brothel seems to have been drawn with care, and, though doubts have lately

been thrown on its authenticity, they are not so well founded as to

justify its rejection. Prostitutes were ordered to live in the brothel.

They were bound to wear a red shoulder-knot as a badge of their calling.

The brothel was to be visited weekly by the bailli and a "barber," the

latter of whom was to examine the girls, and confine separately all who

seemed infected. No Jew was allowed to enter the brothel on any pretext.

Its doors were to be closed on saints' days, and special regulations

guarded against the prevalence of scenes of riot and disorder.[174]

This ordinance seems to have remained in force during the whole occupation

of Avignon by the Popes, and its penalties were occasionally inflicted on

offenders. But if Petrarch and other contemporary writers are to be

believed, the city was none the less a refuge for debauchees, and a

scandal to Christendom. Petrarch complains that it was far more depraved

than old Rome, and a popular proverb confirms, at least in part, his

opinion.[175]

There were, however, in some southern provinces, severe laws against

prostitution, although some of the penalties seem to have been framed as

much with the view of stimulating as of repressing the passions. In one or

two cities we find accounts of prostitutes and their customers being

forced to walk naked through the streets by way of expiation. In others,

the punishment of the iron cage was inflicted on pimps and procuresses.

When a procuress had rendered herself particularly obnoxious, she was

seized, stripped naked, and dragged in the midst of a great crowd to the

water's side. There she was thrust into an iron cage, in which she was

forced to kneel. When the cage door was closed, she was thrown into the

river, and allowed to remain under water long enough to produce temporary

suffocation. This shocking punishment was repeated several times.

A potent influence over the morals of the southern people, the higher

classes at least, was exercised by the institution of chivalry. It was of

the essence of that institution to promote spiritual at the expense of

sensual gratification. The chevalier adored his mistress in secret for

years, without even venturing to breathe her name. For years he carried a

scarf or a ribbon in her honor through battle-scenes and dangers of every

kind, happy when, after a lustrum spent in sighs and hopes, the charmer

condescended to reward his fidelity with a gracious smile. It is evident

that sexual intercourse must have been rare among people who set so high a

value on the merest compliments and slightest tokens of affection; nor can

there be any question but the effect of chivalry was to impart a high tone

to the feelings and language of society, and to soften the manners of all

who came within its influence.

If, on the other hand, we glance at the literature which flourished in

France during the period of the revival of learning, we can not but infer

that the morals of the people at large were not pure. During the

thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, the standard reading of

the educated classes among the French was the celebrated _Roman de la

Rose_, a work of remarkable talent, but, at the same time, distinguished

by a cynic vein of philosophy and a singular obscenity of language. No

portion of that work was wholly free from lewd expressions, and it would

be impossible to quote fifty lines of it to-day in a modern language. The

doctrine of the author with regard to women was insulting and

cynical.[176] They were uniformly depicted as being restrained only by

legal difficulties from giving way to the loosest passions; and all men,

in like manner, were painted as seducers, adulterers, and violators of

young girls. Such was the reading of the best society in France. The

_Roman de la Rose_ was to them what Shakspeare is to us.

Nor was it alone of its kind. Of the works which that age has bequeathed

to us, nearly all are tainted with the same grossness of language and

pruriency of idea. All, or nearly all, breathe the air of the brothel. It

was rather a matter of boasting than of shame with the authors. Villon and

Regnier seem to plume themselves on their familiarity with scenes of

debauch, and their extensive acquaintance among the prostitute class. The

best of their works are descriptions of episodes of dissipation; their

most lively sketches have prostitutes, or their fortunes, or their

diseases, for the themes. They seemed to fancy they were imitating Horace

when they borrowed his most odious blemishes. Some of them were actors as

well as poets, and used the machinery of the stage to disseminate their

lewd compositions. Though it was still unusual, or even unlawful, for

women to appear on the stage in their time, the boys who played female

parts were well drilled to the business, and the performances which

delighted the towns and villages of France fell but little short, in point

of grossness, of the theatrical enormities of the imperial era at Rome.

One may form some idea of the popularity of erotic literature at this

period in France from the amazing vocabulary of erotic terms which is

gathered from the works of Rabelais, Beroald de Verville, Regnier,

Brantome, and their contemporaries. There was not a form of lewdness for

which an appropriate name had not been invented; and as to the ordinary

acts and instruments of prostitution, a dictionary of synonyms might have

been compiled without embracing all of them. Monsieur Dufour, in his

conscientious work, fills a couple of pages with the mere words that were

employed to express the act of fornication.

Many events likewise indicate a loose state of morals. The history of the

_incubes_ and _succubes_, filling some space in every treatise on

demonology, is a most curious feature of the morals of the day. The

existence of demons who made a practice of assailing the virtue of girls

and boys was admitted by some of the fathers of the Church,[177] who

quoted the words of Genesis in support of the singular doctrine. They were

of two kinds: _incubi_, from the Latin _incubare_, male demons who

assailed the chastity of girls; and _succubæ_, female demons who robbed

boys of their innocence. The old chronicles are full of accounts of the

mischievous deeds of these evil spirits. As might be expected, the

_incubi_ were more numerous and more enterprising than the _succubæ_. For

one boy who confessed that a female demon had attacked him in his sleep,

and compelled him to minister to her sensuality, there were a score of

girls who furnished very tolerable evidence of having yielded their

virginity to creatures of the male gender, who, they were satisfied, could

be none other than devils. The ecclesiastical writers of the period have

preserved a number of scandalous stories of the kind, which were so well

credited that Pope Innocent VIII. felt impelled to issue a bull on the

subject, and provide the faithful with an efficacious formula of exorcism.

Females, most of whom appeared to be nuns, confessed that they had been

subject to the scandalous visits of the demons for long periods of time,

and that neither fasting, nor prayer, nor spiritual exercise could

release them from the hated plague. Some girls were brought to admit a

similar intercourse, and were burnt at the stake as partakers of the

nature of sorceresses.[178] Married women made similar confessions. They

stated that they were able to affirm that intercourse with demons was

extremely painful; that their frigid nature, combined with their monstrous

proportions, rendered their society a severe affliction, independently of

the sin. It was noticed that the women, married or single, who applied to

the ecclesiastical authorities for relief from this curious form of

torment were almost invariably young and pretty.

In the year 1637 a public discussion took place at Paris on the question,

Whether there exist _succubæ_ and _incubi_, and whether they can procreate

their species? The discussion was long and elaborate. It was conducted by

a body of learned doctors, in presence of a large audience, composed

partly of ladies; and while the judgment of the tribunal appeared to be in

the negative, it was not so emphatic as to settle the question.[179] Even

a century later, when one of the royal physicians undertook to explode the

theory of lewd demons, and to prove that girls had endeavored to conceal

their intercourse with lovers by attributing to them a devilish character,

the public was not convinced, and the _incubi_ were not left without

believers. The laws still pronounced the penalty of death against all

persons, male or female, who had commerce with demons.

Another practice which was brought to a close about the same time was

entitled "_Le sabat des sorciers_," the witches' vigil. It appears that,

at the earliest times of which we have any record, the inhabitants of

France and Germany were in the habit of frequenting nocturnal assemblies

in which witchcraft was believed or pretended to occupy a prominent place.

In the thirteenth century they were denounced by Pope Gregory IX.,[180]

who was satisfied that the devil had to do with them, and that their prime

object was the gratification of sensuality. His bull did not attain its

object. The witches' meetings were still held, or believed to have been

held throughout the fourteenth, fifteenth, and part of the sixteenth

centuries. The popular belief was that the persons in league with witches

anointed their bodies with magical ointment, bestrode a broom, and were

forthwith carried through the air to the place of meeting; that Satan was

present at the ceremony in the form of a huge he-goat, and received the

homage of the witches and their proselytes; that songs and dances followed

next in order, and that the whole performance was closed with a scene of

promiscuous debauchery.[181] The Inquisition took the matter in hand, and

obtained affidavits from several females averring that they had had

commerce with demons on these occasions, and relating with singular

crudity the peculiar sensations they experienced.[182] On the strength of

this evidence prosecutions were instituted, and many persons were

condemned and executed.

It has been usual in modern times to regard the persecution of the witches

as a proof of the barbarous intolerance of the ancient Church; but, in

truth, a careful examination of the evidence leaves no room for doubting

that witchcraft was only the cloak of real vices. Most of the persons who

were burned in France as sorcerers had really used the popular belief in

magic to hide their own debaucheries, and had succeeded in depraving large

numbers of youth of both sexes. It was stated by a theological writer of

the time of Francis I., that in his day there were one hundred thousand

persons sold to Satan in France.[183] Allowing for some exaggeration, it

must still be inferred from this statement that this form of prostitution

had assumed alarming proportions. Nor is there any good reason for

doubting but priests and other persons of lewd propensities turned the

simplicity of the village girls to account in very many instances, and

richly earned the severe penalty that was inflicted upon them by the arm

of the Church. The vigil, or _sabat_, disappears from history during the

sixteenth century. That it had been for some time before its extinction a

haunt of debauchees and a fertile source of prostitution, the writers on

demonology and the old chroniclers establish incontrovertibly.

Other aids to prostitution were obtained from the very ranks of the

Church. During the Middle Ages numbers of strange sects appeared, many of

which relied for success on the favor they allowed to sensuality. At the

present day it is not easy to determine what proportion of the stories

that are in print respecting many of these sects were the fruit of

sectarian jealousy on the part of their rivals; some of them were

doubtless calumniated, but there are others about whose character and

practices there is no room for controversy. The Flagellants, for instance,

who counted eight hundred thousand proselytes in France in the fourteenth

century, were unquestionably depraved. They marched in procession, men and

women together, through the cities of France, each member of the society

using the whip freely on the bare back of the person before him; and at

night they assembled in country places, and proceeded to more serious

flagellations. The opinion of learned persons ascribed erotic effects to

these flagellations, it being said, apparently with truth, that when the

flagellants had excited their senses by their discipline, they gave way to

frantic debauchery. However this be, it is plain that the spectacle of

naked men and women marching in procession and scourging one another can

not but have been provocative of prostitution.[184]

Another similar sect was the Adamites, who argued that nudity was the law

of nature, and that clothes were an abomination in the sight of God. It is

said that, at first, the Adamites insisted on nudity only during their

religious exercises, and that their proselytes stripped themselves within

the place of worship; but one, Picard, who became a leading authority in

the sect, took the ground that their principles should be carried out

boldly in the face of the world. He and his followers, male and female,

accordingly appeared in the streets in the costume in which they were

born. The Inquisition very properly laid hands on them, punished some, and

exiled the others.[185]

Again: if we pass from individual accidents to the state of society at

large, we shall find many features that can not have been aids to virtue.

Allusion has already been made to the obscene character of much of the

early poetry of France, and to the excessive grossness of those works

especially which obtained, and perhaps deserved, the widest popularity.

Many of the customs of the day were equally adverse to sound morals. To

cite one by way of example: On the _Jour des Innocents_, which fell on the

28th of December, men were allowed to invade the bed-chambers of girls,

and, if they could find them in bed, to administer the chastisement which

used to be common in schools. Hence arose the proverbial expression,

_Donner les innocents à quelqu'un_, which meant to birch a person on the

bare skin. No doubt the old chroniclers were justified in saying that when

the girl was worth the trouble, the invader of the chamber was not

satisfied with inflicting a chastisement.[186]

Marriages were attended with ceremonies far grosser than any that were

practiced in Rome. It was not only decorous, it was fashionable, both for

men and women, to spy out the bed-chamber of the newly-wedded couple, and

the fortunate man or girl who had contrived to see the interior of the

room through a chink in the wall or a hole in the door was loudly

applauded when the result of his or her discoveries was made known.[187]

The invention of bridal chambers is therefore not original in America, as

some have supposed.

Strange to say, neither the lewdness of the poets nor the grossness of the

social habits of the times strikes one as more singular than the tone of

the sermons which were delivered in Paris at the same period. One of the

most famous preachers of the day was Maillard, who rose to eminence under

Louis XI. His sermons on the luxury and corruptions of the times were very

popular. We find him cursing the "burgesses" who, for the sake of gain,

let their houses to prostitutes: "_Vultis vivere de posterioribus

meretricum_," he cries, indignantly. He denounces with extraordinary

virulence the "crimes of impudicity which are committed in churches," and

which "the pillars and nave would denounce, if they had eyes and a voice."

He did not spare his congregation. Turning fiercely to the women who sat

before him, he apostrophized them: "Dicatis, vos, mulieres, posuistis,

posuistis filias ad peccandum? vos, mulieres, per vestros traitus impudiæ,

provocastis alios ad peccandum? Et vos, maquerellæ, quid dicitis?" He

thunders against this latter class, the procuresses, who ought, he says,

to be burned at the stake, especially when, as is often the case, they are

both the mothers and the venders of their daughters. Words fail him to

denounce the intercourse of abandoned women with ecclesiastics; he invokes

the divine wrath upon those of his congregation _quæ dant corpus

curialibus, monachis, presbyteris_. Both he and other famous preachers of

the day pronounced maledictions upon lewd convents, which some of them say

are mere seraglios for the bishops and monks, where every abomination is

practiced.

It was estimated that at this time, say the fifteenth century, when Paris

was comparatively a small city, it contained five to six thousand

prostitutes, who were said by an Italian to be far more beautiful and

attractive than any prostitutes he had seen elsewhere.

CHAPTER VII.

FRANCE.--HISTORY FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO LOUIS XIII.

The Court.--Louis IX. to Charles V.--Charles VI.--Agnes Sorel.--Louis

XI.--Charles VIII.--Louis XII.--Francis I.--La Belle Feronniere.--

Henry II.--Diana de Poictiers.--Lewd Books and Pictures.--Catharine of

Medicis.--Margaret.--Henry IV.--Mademoiselle de Entragues.--Henry

III.--Mignons.--Influence of the Ligue.--Indecency of Dress.--

Theatricals.--Ordinance of 1560.--Police Regulations.

The memoranda we have already given will enable the reader to form an idea

of the state of society at large. It remains to say something of the

court, which, in some respects, was France.

From Louis IX. to Charles V. inclusive, it is said that the kings of

France set no example of debauchery, and that the court rather encouraged

virtue than vice. When the sisters-in-law of Philip the Handsome

scandalized Paris by their loose life in the Tour de Nesle, into which

they were said to make a practice of inveigling students, whom they

assassinated when their lubricity was satiated, the king had them brought

to punishment and dealt with as though the popular scandal was well

founded in fact. When Charles VI. ascended the throne the scene changed.

This unfortunate monarch was not only himself weak and depraved, but his

wife, Isabel of Bavaria, was more vicious still. The pair encouraged every

practice that could shock modesty or outrage decency. The queen lived

almost openly with her lover, the Duke of Orleans. The king, so long as he

retained his reason, was a leading actor in the scandalous masquerades of

the court, and narrowly escaped losing his life on one occasion when he

disguised himself as a devil, and danced immodestly before the ladies of

the court. Round his loins, as round those of his fellow-demons, a sort of

girdle of tow had been fastened, and all the masqueraders were chained

together. In the midst of their dances, some foolish person threw a

lighted torch at them. Their girdles took fire, and all were burned to

death except the king, whom the Duchess of Berri saved by courageously

raising her skirts and throwing them over the burning monarch.

Charles had had many mistresses in his youth. When he went mad, the

physicians directed the queen to refuse to discharge her conjugal duty.

Charles had enough of his former nature left to resent this privation. He

even employed force, and succeeded at last in compelling his wife to

resume her place in the royal couch. She contrived, however, to defraud

him by hiring a pretty girl to take her place. It is said Charles never

detected the fraud. His wife, meanwhile, gave the reins to her loose

passions, and was known to have had at least a score of lovers.

A very striking picture of the manners of the time is afforded by the

story of Agnes Sorel. She was, as is known, the mistress of Charles VII.,

a lady of good family, and, otherwise than as the king's mistress, of

spotless reputation. Her influence over the king she used for the best of

purposes. It was she who roused him to make the efforts which eventually

expelled the foreigner from France. Her private character was laudable:

she was amiable, generous, kind, and true; yet when she visited Paris in

company with the king, the crowd followed her whenever she appeared in the

streets, insulting her, and calling her a prostitute in the grossest

terms. The king lived with her eighteen years, but never ventured to

acknowledge her publicly as his mistress. Of the four daughters she bore

him, three only were legitimated by his successor.

Louis XI. had a seraglio and a colony of bastards before he became king,

nor did he alter his mode of life when he assumed control of the kingdom.

His favorites were usually chosen from the lowest class of his subjects,

many of whom had gone through an apprenticeship for the king's service in

the houses of prostitution of the capital. Louis never pretended to bear

them any affection; he used them as he used the men of letters who

composed for his diversion the lewd tales which have reached us.

Charles VIII. appears to have been more virtuous than his predecessors,

though, of course, he did not pique himself upon any conjugal fidelity. A

story is told which reflects credit upon his character. It is said that

during his campaign in Italy, when he retired to his chamber one evening,

he found there a young girl of marvelous beauty in a state of complete

déshabillé. She was kneeling and in tears when the king entered. On

Charles inquiring the cause of her sorrow, she confessed that her parents

had sold her to the king's valet for the use of his majesty, and conjured

Charles to spare her. The king was touched by her distress. He inquired

into the facts, and, finding that they were as she stated, and, farther,

that she was betrothed to a youth of the neighborhood, he sent for him and

married the young couple forthwith.

It appears certain that Charles's death was caused by his indiscreet

commerce with the sex. All the chroniclers state that he fell a victim to

the indulgence of his passions, being frail of body and of feeble

constitution.

The court of Louis XII. was purer than that of his predecessors, owing to

the austere virtue of the queen. Louis himself had shared the profligacies

of his family in his youth, but, on becoming king, he allowed his wife to

regulate his household according to her principles. For the first time for

many years, say the old chroniclers, prostitution was banished from court.

We shall have something to say of Francis I. in connection with syphilis,

of which he was a conspicuous and an early victim. At the age of eighteen

his mother stated that he had been punished where he sinned. The

misfortune did not operate as a warning. His life was notoriously

dissolute at a time when profligacy was so much the rule that it was

hardly likely to be noticed. Brantome asserts positively[188] that his

expedition to Italy was prompted by the desire to make acquaintance with a

courtesan of Milan whose charms Admiral Bonnivet had extolled. Previous to

his time, it seems, there had always been attached to the court a body of

prostitutes for the use of the courtiers. Francis suppressed this body,

and actually invited the ladies of the court to take their place. Brantome

reviews this policy, and while he praises it in view of the "joyous

pastimes" to which it led, he is bound to acknowledge that it produced the

greatest immorality ever known in France. The ladies of the town followed

the example of those of the court, and but little was wanting but that

every woman in France became a prostitute.

It was the custom during this reign for the king to invite all his

courtiers and their wives and daughters to lodge at the royal palaces from

time to time. The ladies had apartments by themselves, and to each room

the king had a key. We are assured that the husbands, fathers, and

brothers of ladies who refused to submit to the royal demands had but

little chance of retaining their offices. If they had been guilty of

maladministration or peculation, as was the case with most of them, they

could hope for pardon only through the complaisance of their female

relatives. The story of M. de St. Vallier, who was reprieved on the

scaffold in payment for the favors which his daughter, the beautiful Diana

of Poictiers, had granted to the king, is too well known to need

repetition here.

It was the boast of Francis that he had always respected the honor of the

ladies of the court, and the boast was just, from his point of view. His

visits to his mistresses were always made in a mysterious manner, and at

night. Even to the Duchess of Etampes, who was his acknowledged mistress

and procuress for a period of nearly twenty years, he never behaved in

public in a manner to compromise her reputation. In private he was not so

scrupulous. When this lady's husband disturbed the king one evening,

Francis drew his sword on him, and threatened to kill him instantly if he

dared to reveal what every one knew, or to punish the wife at whose

adultery he had connived for years. His idea seems to have been that words

alone constituted the sin of debauchery. On one occasion he took all the

ladies of the court to see the royal deer in the rutting season; but when

a gentleman ventured a very obvious pleasantry on the scene, he exiled him

from court for life.

His death has been frequently described. Some writers imply, by their

silence, doubts of the authenticity of the story of _La Belle

Ferronnière_; but it rests on very tolerable evidence. This lady, who was

uncommonly beautiful, was the wife of a lawyer or a merchant (the

authorities do not agree on the point). The king solicited her favors,

but, strange to say, was met with a positive refusal. On consultation with

the court lawyers, however, Francis was informed that he could, by the

exercise of his royal prerogative, enjoy the company of any woman he

pleased, and the Ferronnière was accordingly notified that the king

commanded her to yield to his desires. She confided the order to her

husband, who, on reflection, counseled her to submit. Meanwhile

Ferronnière himself used his best endeavors to catch a syphilitic disease,

which he communicated to his wife. She gave it to the king, who died of it

after much suffering.

Henry II. had the merit of fidelity, not to his wife, but to his mistress.

The latter was the famous Diana de Poictiers, whose successful

intercession with Francis I. on her father's behalf has been already

noticed. Brantome asserts that she did not emulate the constancy of her

royal lover, saying that in her youth she had "obliged many persons." He

tells a story which, if true, reflects credit on the temper of the king.

Visiting his mistress one day, he surprised her in the company of a

courtier named Brissac, who had only time to hide himself under the bed.

After spending some moments with Diana, the king asked for some

refreshments. Some boxes of confectionery were brought him, and in the

midst of his meal he took a box and threw it under the bed, saying,

"Halloo, Brissac, every body must live!" Diana lost no portion of her

lover's heart in consequence of her infidelities. This she owed in some

degree to her extraordinary beauty, which she preserved so late in life

that it was commonly reported she was in the habit of using soap made of

liquid gold. Henry was proud of his mistress, and never concealed their

liaison. He had his arms interwoven with hers on many public buildings and

pieces of plate. He used constantly to ride through the streets with the

beautiful Diana on his crupper; and he showed her so marked a preference

over his wife that judicious courtiers never made the mistake of courting

the latter.

But the orderly life of the king was not imitated by the court. According

to Brantome and Sauval, the excesses of the age of Francis were aggravated

under Henry. It was rare, says the former, that ladies presented their

virginity to their husbands; and husbands who objected to the intimacy of

their wives with "kings, princes, noblemen, and others of the court," were

eschewed from society. A woman was held to be virtuous because she begged

her lover to wait till she was married to gratify his desires; married

women who retained their love for the same _galant_ for several years were

considered models of purity. Brantome intimates distinctly that ordinary

debauchery fell short of the desires of the courtiers; incest, sodomy, and

similar enormities could alone satiate the passions of the old debauchees

of the day.

The same writer partially explains the spread of vice by saying that

within the last half century the ladies of France had acquired the arts of

Italy; nor is it doubtful that with the Medicis many of the monstrous

vices which have been peculiar to Italy ever since the age of Imperial

Rome were imported into France. We hear of all kinds of instruments of

debauchery; of lewd books and lewd pictures; of indecent sculptures and

bronzes being sold without let or hinderance in the stores of Paris. It

was the age of Aretino; and besides that famous or infamous writer, a

number of other Italians had competed for the prize of lewdness in

composition. Poets, painters, sculptors, seemed to try how far art could

be prostituted. Cellini, Leonardo da Vinci, Giulio Romano, Nicollo dell'

Abate, and, indeed, almost all their contemporaries, debased their genius

by the execution of indecent works. Many of these found their way to

Paris. When Pope Clement VII. undertook to prosecute the authors of

indecent works, whether in letters or art, most of the compositions that

were endangered by his bull were transported to France. Brantome alludes

to many of them as being quite common in his time. He describes, for

instance, a silver goblet on which the most indecent scenes were graven,

and which a nobleman of the court always obliged the ladies who visited

him to use at table. Other noblemen had their rooms painted in fresco in

similar taste. It is stated that Anne of Austria caused three hundred

thousand écus worth of frescoes of this kind to be removed from the

ceilings of the palace at Fontainebleau.[189] But in the reign of Henry

II. it does not appear that any one was ever prosecuted for dealing in

this kind of merchandise.

During the three following reigns, it was Catharine of Medicis who gave

the tone to the court, and really ruled the kingdom. All historians concur

in stating that she used prostitution as the mainspring of her policy. She

had a court of sometimes two to three hundred ladies of honor, whom she

employed to worm out the secrets of the politicians of the day. They were

known as the Queen's Flying Squadron, and it appears they performed their

duties successfully; of course, at the cost of whatever virtue or decency

the court still retained. Brantome is still our authority for asserting

that they introduced a new feature of debauchery; they took the initiative

in affairs of this kind, and instead of yielding to the entreaties of

lovers, it was they who pressed their lovers to meet them half way. He

likewise informs us that they aided the establishment in France of other

vices which had hitherto been peculiar to Southern and Eastern climates,

by the revival of practices which had been common among the _hetairæ_ of

Athens.

It has been asserted that Catharine willfully tutored her children in

habits of debauchery, in order to divert their minds from politics, and

retain control over the kingdom, but this scandal does not appear to rest

on authentic evidence. It is unquestionable, however, that Charles IX.,

the author of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, lived in incestuous

intercourse with his sister Margaret, and there seems no reason to doubt

the truth of the story that Catharine more than once entertained the king

and court at a banquet at which nude females served as waiters.

Perhaps the best idea of the morals of the time can be obtained from the

adventures of the Margaret just mentioned, who married Henry IV., King of

Navarre, and afterward King of France. It is said that at the age of

eleven she had two lovers, both of whom claimed to have robbed her of her

virtue. Marrying the King of Navarre, she found means to leave her husband

and reside at Paris, whose air suited her better than the country. Here

her debaucheries were a common theme of scandal, her lovers being counted

by the score. Happening at last to give birth to a child which

mysteriously disappeared, her brother Henry III. sent her to her husband

in a quasi-disgrace. Henry of Navarre refused to cohabit with her. The

king vainly endeavored to reconcile the couple. With more zeal than tact,

he used as an argument with his cousin that the mother of the King of

Navarre had not herself led an irreproachable life. At this Henry burst

into a laugh, and remarked to the envoy that the king was very

complimentary in his letters, his majesty having in the first described

the vices of the wife, and in the second alluded to the frailties of the

mother.

He persisted in refusing to receive Margaret, and she took refuge in the

little town of Agen, but no sooner began to lead her usual life there than

the people rose and expelled her. She found a second refuge in the

fortress of Usson, and there she lived twenty years in a sort of prison

which she converted into a brothel. She was debarred from the society of

men of fashion and courtiers, but for her purposes, servants, secretaries,

musicians, and even the peasants of the neighborhood answered as well, and

of these there was no lack. Returning to Paris in her old age, she did not

alter her course of life. She became outwardly devout, and established a

nunnery and monastery near her hotel; the latter, the people said, in

order to have monks always at hand; but the list of her lovers remained

undiminished to the very verge of her death.[190]

Nor did her husband present any striking contrast to his wife, though he

reflected so severely upon her in the work published under the title _Le

divorce Satirique_. Bayle remarks that, had he not expended so large a

portion of his energy in the pursuit of sensual pleasures, he would have

been one of the greatest heroes of history.[191] He was profuse and

indiscriminate in his attachments; duchess or farmer's daughter, it was

all the same to him. He changed his mistress once a month at least. As an

exception to this rule, his affection for Gabrielle d'Estrées, a very

lovely creature, whom he shared with the Marquis of Bellegarde, and who

bore him, or them, three children, lasted several years. He was not

faithful to her, and made no secret of his infidelities, but he loved her

passionately. On one occasion he left his army in the midst of a campaign,

disguised himself as a peasant, and traveled through the enemy's country

to meet her. He once went to see her, but was stopped at the door with the

announcement that Bellegarde was with her. His first impulse was one of

rage. Drawing his sword, he rushed toward the door, but stopped half way,

and saying, "No, it would make her angry," he returned home. Gabrielle was

a very beautiful and charming person. She was in the habit of having

herself painted in a state of perfect nudity, with her children playing

around her.

When she died, Henry proposed to replace her by Mademoiselle D'Entragues,

whose beauty had made some sensation at court. Negotiations were opened

with the lady, who dutifully placed the matter in the hands of her family,

and father, mother, and brothers began to treat with the king for the

prostitution of their daughter and sister. They asked a hundred thousand

crowns. The king thought the sum large, and offered fifty thousand, but

the family refusing to give way, he acceded to their demands. They then

added that they would like to have a promise of marriage, conditioned upon

the lady's bearing a male child within a year. To this likewise Henry

agreed, in spite of Sully's remonstrances; and Mdlle. D'Entragues became

the acknowledged mistress of the king. It need not be added that the

promise of marriage was never fulfilled.

Some time afterward Henry fell in love with a young lady who was betrothed

to Marshal Bassompierre. As ardent as ever, he sent for the marshal,

explained his feelings, and ordered Bassompierre to renounce his claims.

The marshal obeyed, and Henry married the lady (who was a Montmorency) to

the Prince of Condé. The marriage was hardly over before the king opened

negotiations with the bride. It will be scarcely credited that the

emissary he employed was the mother of the Prince of Condé, who left no

means untried to effect the dishonor of her son. The prince, of less

complacent temper than most other courtiers, refused to allow his wife to

become the king's mistress. He removed her from France, and, just as Henry

was about to send after her, the assassin Ravaillac freed Condé from the

danger.

The disorders of Henry III., the predecessor of the King of Navarre, are

shamefully notorious. There was a time during his reign when, for the same

reason which induced the establishment of _Dicteria_ at Athens,

prostitution almost seemed a desirable institution at Paris. In his youth

he had been a famous seducer of the ladies of honor. An anecdote of his

life at this period not only reveals the tone of the court, but happily

shows that depravity was not so universal as might be imagined. When Henry

was chosen King of Poland, he was anxious to settle his mistress, Mdlle.

de Chateauneuf, by finding her a husband. He applied to a courtier, the

Provost of Paris, M. de Nantonillet, but received the scathing reply that

"M. de Nantonillet would not marry a prostitute till the king had

established brothels in the Louvre."

It is best, perhaps, to throw a veil over the later stories of Henry III.,

his _mignons_, and the frightful infamies that were practiced in Paris in

his time. They may be divined from the fact that Brantome mentions some

orgies in which the king and a party of friends, male and female, stripped

themselves naked, and tried to place themselves on a level with the brute

creation, as rather redeeming instances of his sensuality.

We shall take occasion hereafter to follow the history of the court from

Louis XIII. to modern times. Meanwhile, some features of society bearing

on prostitution in the age we have sketched must be briefly noted.

It is asserted by all the chroniclers that the influence of the League

(_Ligue_) was most pernicious. A sort of religious enthusiasm seems to

have been kindled by the sectarian strife of the period, and practices

which purported to be religious, but were only immoral, were encouraged by

the highest authorities. Religious fanaticism ruled throughout France. Men

and women walked naked in processions which were led by the curates. As

was natural at an age of civil war, violence was freely used toward

females by both of the contending armies. At every city that was taken,

either by the Leaguers or the Huguenots, all the women, married and

single, were violated by the soldiery; such, at least, is the statement of

a contemporary historian. Moreover, in the general confusion, no proper

police was enforced either at Paris or elsewhere, and the windows of

print-shops teemed with lewd pictures, which no one, says the historian,

thought of having seized. It was, in fact, a period of anarchy. The _Moyen

de parvenir_, by Beroalde de Venille, which has reached us, affords some

criterion of the popular literature of the day. Aretino, text and plates,

was much in vogue; and Sanchez and Benedicti left their lay rivals far

behind in the composition of works which may contend for the palm of

lewdness with Martial or Petronius.[192]

Throughout the Middle Ages, and, indeed, up to the middle of the

seventeenth century, great complaint was made by the clergy of the

indecency of the dress of the people of France. About the thirteenth

century it became fashionable to adorn the toe of the shoe or boot with an

ornament in metal; either a lion's claw, or an eagle's beak, or something

of that kind. Some immodest person ventured to substitute a sexual image

in bronze for the usual appendage, and the fashion soon became general.

Women even adopted it, and all the best society of Paris soon exhibited

the indecency on their feet. The king forbade their use by royal

edicts,[193] and a special bull was fulminated against them by Pope Urban

V.,[194] but the monstrous shoes held their ground against both, and were

only disused when fashion set in a different direction. The _Braguette_

was another enormity of the same character. Originally, it is said, the

working-classes invented the idea of a small bag hanging between the knees

in which a knife or other utensil could be carried. The fashion was

adopted about the beginning of the fifteenth century by men of rank, and

became immediately of an immodest nature. All the arts of fashion were

called into requisition to give the _braguettes_ the most novel and

remarkable appearance, and every possible means was used to render them at

once disgustingly indecent and extravagantly rich. They were attached to

the dress with gay-colored ribbons, and, when the wearer was a rich man,

were adorned with jewels and lace. At the time Montaigne wrote,

_braguettes_ had almost gone out of vogue: they were worn only by old men,

who, in the language of the essayist, "make public parade of what can not

decently be mentioned." Women, on their side, invented hoops, bustles, and

low-necked dresses. The libraries contain a large collection of works

written by moralists and preachers of the time against these "indecent

abuses" of the ladies. As they are all in use at the present time, we may

perhaps conclude that the old French moralists were unnecessarily alarmed;

but it is likely that the form of the bustle was by no means as modest as

that of modern crinoline skirts, and that the fashion of ladies' drawers

had not yet come in. Such, at least, is the inference from some of the

criticisms they provoked. The exposure of the breasts was checked for a

time under Louis XIV., but the reform was evanescent, and the custom

against which churchmen thundered in the sixteenth century survives

to-day.

Some allusion has already been made to the theatre. Theatricals were

forbidden by the early French kings, at the instigation of the Church, but

the prohibition was evaded by the performance of scenes from the Gospel

dramatized. From the remains of these Moralities it would appear that they

were always coarse and often immoral. The devil always played a prominent

part, and would have been inconsistent had he not outraged decency. Under

Henry III. women began to appear on the stage, and farces very broad in

ideas and language began to be played instead of the old Moralities. We

are led to believe that nothing was too scandalous to be represented on

the stage; in fact, the idea seems to have been to crowd as much

sensuality and vice into the farces as possible. Scarcely any incident of

life was too indecent to be either portrayed or described, and if the

latter, the description was given in the most undisguised language. It is

altogether impossible to transcribe scenes of this nature. Enough to say

that women were made to go through the pains of childbirth on the stage;

husband and wife went to bed in presence of the public; and when modesty

prompted the retirement of actors for causes still more indecent, a

colleague rarely failed to explain why they had retired and what they were

doing behind the curtain. Many of La Fontaine's most _grivois_ stories

were taken from farces which were once acted with copious pantomime before

the ladies of Paris. Even as late as the reign of Henry IV., plays of this

character were commonly acted at Paris at the Hotel de Bourgogne. It was

usual for the star actor to speak a prologue or an interlude, which was

invariably recommended by its indecency. We have some of the titles of

these prologues, and they were generally of the same character as the one

on the question, _Uter vir an mulier se magis delectet in copulatione_.

Of the number of regular prostitutes exercising their calling in France

during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries no correct estimate can be

made. It was undoubtedly large. During the religious wars, a writer on the

side of Protestantism undertook to draw up a statement of the number of

prostitutes and lewd women whose vices were chargeable to the clergy. His

estimate is, of course, open to suspicion, as being a sectarian

performance; but, allowing for great exaggeration, it will still appear

alarming. He calculates that there were at that time one million of women,

more or less, who led habitually lewd lives, and ministered to the

passions of the clergy. These were independent of the married women who

were led into adultery, and of the pimps and procuresses who were in

clerical pay.[195]

To return to the laws regulating prostitution, it appears that a serious

effort was made to put it down under the sovereignty of Catharine of

Medicis. An ordinance of Charles IX., dated 1560, prohibited the opening

or keeping of any brothel or house of reception for prostitutes in Paris.

For a short period it seems that the practice was actually suppressed, and

the consequence is said to have been a large increase of secret

debauchery. A few years after the passage of the ordinance, a Huguenot

clergyman named Cayet proposed to re-establish public brothels in the

interest of the public morals, but the authorities of his Church assailed

him so vehemently that his scheme fell to the ground without having had

the benefit of a public discussion, and he was himself driven to join the

Romanists. In 1588 an ordinance of Henry III. reaffirmed the ordinance of

1560, and alleged that the magistrates of the city had connived at the

establishment of brothels. Ordinances of the provost followed in the same

strain, and all prostitutes were required to leave Paris within

twenty-four hours. An ordinance dated 1635 was still more rigorous. It

condemned all men concerned in the "traffic of prostitution" to the

galleys for life, and all women and girls to be "whipped, shaved, and

banished for life, without any formal trial." As might be imagined, this

ordinance was alternately disregarded and made to serve the purposes of

private malice. Men who wished to revenge themselves on their mistresses

accused them of being prostitutes; but _it does not appear that the actual

supply was ever seriously diminished_.

CHAPTER VIII.

FRANCE.--HISTORY FROM LOUIS XIII. TO THE PRESENT DAY.

Exile of Prostitutes.--Measures of Louis XIV.--Laws of 1684 and

1713.--Police Regulations.--Ordinance of 1778.--Republican

Legislation.--Frightful state of Paris.--Efforts to pass a general

Law.--The Court.--Louis XIII.--The Medicis.--Louis XIV.--La

Vallière.--Montespan.--Maintenon.--Literature of the Day.--Feudal

Rights.--The Regency.--Duchess of Berri.--Claudine du Tencin.--Louis

XV.--Madame de Pompadour.--Dubarry.--Pare aux Cerfs.--Louis

XVI.--Philippe Egalité.--Subsequent Sovereigns.--Literature.--Lewd

Novels and Pictures.--Tendency of Philosophy.--The Church.

We have thus sketched the history of prostitution in France from the

commencement of the French nation to the reign of Louis XIII. This chapter

will complete the subject to the present day.

The ordinance of 1560, prohibiting prostitution in any shape, and granting

twenty-four hours only to prostitutes and their accomplices to evacuate

Paris, remained in force till late in the eighteenth century. Though, so

far as the general traffic went, it was a dead letter, it enabled the

police authorities to imprison or exile unruly prostitutes from time to

time, and was the basis of the high-handed measure by which the colonists

of Canada were first supplied with wives direct from the Paris stews. It

also enabled noblemen and officials connected with government to avenge

themselves upon unfaithful mistresses, and to exercise a convenient sort

of tyranny over the pretty _ling_ères and sewing-girls of the metropolis.

In 1684 Louis XIV. made some alteration in the laws governing

prostitution. He provided prisons for the detention of prostitutes, and

armed the lieutenant of police with authority to correct them; and he drew

a broad line of distinction between dissolute women who were not actually

upon the town and the class of prostitutes proper.

A farther police regulation on the subject was made in 1713. By that

measure a sort of regularity was introduced into the procedure against

courtesans and lewd women. They were definitely divided into two classes:

women who led dissolute lives without being precisely prostitutes, and

prostitutes proper. The police were authorized to interfere against both

on complaint of any person who charged them with outraging public

decency. In the case of prostitutes the proceeding was summary. The

culprit was summoned, condemned on slight evidence, and sentenced either

to exile, imprisonment, or, more rarely, to a whipping or the loss of her

hair. With regard to dissolute women who were not regular prostitutes, the

authorities proceeded more cautiously. They were entitled to all the

privileges of other accused persons, sentences rendered against them being

subject to appeal; and, when found guilty, the penalty inflicted was

usually a fine. Occasionally, the houses where they had carried on their

calling were closed, the furniture was thrown out of the window, and a

crier proclaimed their disgrace throughout the city.

Monsieur Parent-Duchatelet, who had the patience to read all the records

of proceedings against prostitutes in the city of Paris from 1724 to 1788,

_infers_ the law from these instances of its application, and concludes:

(1.) That, notwithstanding the ordinance of 1560, brothels were licensed

by the police. (2.) That prostitutes were never troubled except on

complaint of a responsible person. (3.) That brothels were disorderly;

that riots, rows, and murders not unfrequently occurred within their walls

or in their neighborhood. (4.) That the punishment was left to the

discretion of the magistrate. (5.) That the penalties inflicted were

lighter toward the close of the period examined. (6.) That certain streets

in Paris were wholly occupied by prostitutes.[196]

Probably with a view to enlarge the discretion of the magistrates, a new

ordinance was passed in 1778, renewing, in peremptory language, the

prohibitive provisions of the enactment of 1560. This ordinance, which

bears the name, and probably emanated from the office of Lenoir, the

police magistrate, declares that no public woman shall hereafter try to

catch (_raccrocher_) men on the wharves or boulevards, or in the streets

or squares of Paris, under penalty of being shaved, whipped, and

imprisoned; that no householder shall let his house, or any part thereof,

to prostitutes, under penalty of five hundred francs fine, and that

boarding-house keepers shall allow no men and women to sleep together

without seeing their marriage contract.

The most curious feature in connection with this ordinance was the fact

that it was not intended or held to interfere with established brothels,

which the government continued to license as before. It was intended to

affect private prostitutes only. We may judge of its success from the

general statement that, soon after its passage, the streets and squares

were thronged with prostitutes. No woman or modest person could walk the

garden of the Tuileries at night. Lewd women showed themselves at their

windows in a state of nudity, and shocked public decency still more

glaringly by their postures in the streets. It was, in fact, so complete a

failure, that two years after its establishment it was practically

repealed by a new police regulation.

In 1791, the whole body of the legislation of the monarchy was abolished,

and in its stead the republican Legislature enacted a code which was the

only law in force in France. That code making no reference to

prostitution, it was inferred by lawyers that women had a natural right to

prostitute their bodies if they chose, and accordingly the traffic became

open and free. The consequence of this was a tremendous development of the

vice. Prostitutes established themselves in every street, and monopolized

every public place. Paris became scarcely habitable for modest women. An

outcry against this monstrous state of things reached the Executive

Directory in 1796, and that body sent a message to the Council of Five

Hundred, begging them to legislate on the subject. The message was clear

and able, calling upon the council to define "prostitute," and suggesting

that "reiterated offenses legally proved, public notoriety, or arrest in

the act," appeared to constitute proof of prostitution. It seemed to call

for penalties, in the shape of imprisonment, on women exercising this

calling. But neither this suggestion, nor a subsequent project of the same

character was ever carried into effect. Napoleon swept the Palais Royal of

the prostitutes who had made it their head-quarters, and broke up some of

the greatest brothels by harassing their inmates in various ways, but he

made no law on the subject.

In 1811, M. Pasquier, Prefect of Police, drafted a bill for the regulation

of prostitutes, but it never went into effect, and the imperial ordinance

drawn by the prefect has been lost. Five years later, M. Anglis, Prefect

of Police under Louis XVIII., attempted the same thing with no better

success, the law officers of the crown seeming to have supposed that the

general provisions of the articles of the code on public decency and

"outrages upon public morality" covered the particular case of

prostitution. The last efforts that were made in France to obtain a law

for the regulation of prostitution were in 1819 and 1822, when the

ministry seriously thought of settling the whole matter by a royal

declaration. These endeavors had the same fate as the former ones,

leading to no result.

A general impression has prevailed of late years that the moral sense of

the public would be shocked by any legislative act licensing so great a

sin as prostitution; and as the government has assumed, without

constitutional warrant, the control and regulation of prostitutes, and has

exercised as full authority as it could have done had there been a law on

the subject, the deficiency has hardly been felt. A conscientious official

has occasionally experienced qualms of conscience at acting without legal

warrant; the government has sometimes been frightened by a menace of

resistance from some bold lawyer, but no trouble has ever actually arisen,

and custom now gives to the police regulations the force of law.

We shall review these regulations in another place; meanwhile a glance

must be cast upon the progress of morality in France during the

seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.

The gallantry which distinguished the court of Henry IV. became more

refined, though not less criminal, under Louis XIII. Adultery and

seduction were every-day matters in the circles which educated Mary, Queen

of Scots, and developed the wit of the author of Grammont's Memoirs. Every

lady was presumed to have a lover; every man of fashion more than one

mistress. Richelieu boasted that no lady could reject him when he chose to

throw the handkerchief, and Mazarin was accused of intrigues with the

queen herself. Louis did not blush to visit his mistresses at the head of

his guards, and in all the pomp of royalty; and, as an instance of their

influence over him, it has been stated that it was at the request of

Mademoiselle de la Fayette that he consented to visit his wife nine months

before the birth of Louis XIV.

A race of women had sprung up, under the teaching of the Medicis, who

combined political skill with licentious propensities, and conducted state

and amorous intrigues with equal ardor and success. The ladies who

surrounded Anne of Austria and Mary of Medicis, and that brilliant circle

which has been described in the Memoirs of Madame de Longueville and

Madame de Sablé, were undoubtedly as dissipated as they were refined;

their virtues were in inverse proportion to their wit. Paris no longer

witnessed the Louvre converted into a royal preserve, or detestable

debauchees haunting its dark passages; but there reigned throughout the

court an air of polished sensuality, which, in point of fact, must have

been at least equally prejudicial to good morals.

Louis XIV. imbibed the spirit of the age during his minority. Royal

mistresses had become a recognized institution, fathers and husbands

rather courting than dreading dishonor at the hands of the king. After

having dispensed his favors with some impartiality among the ladies of the

court, he discovered, apparently to his surprise, that one of them, a

charming girl, named Louise de la Vallière, really loved him. The only

person who showed much annoyance at the warmth with which the king entered

upon this new liaison was the Duchess of Orleans, Henrietta of England,

the king's sister-in-law, who seems to have expected that she would be the

fortunate recipient of whatever crumbs might fall from the royal table.

She was unable, however, to divert Louis from his purpose; La Vallière

became his mistress, and bore him two children. When he grew tired of her,

as he did soon after the birth of her second child, she retired into a

convent, and expiated her fault by thirty years' austere penitence.

The king then turned his attention to a lady of noble rank, the wife of

the Marquis of Montespan, and in a business manner exiled the marquis to

his estate, and lived with his wife. A woman otherwise virtuous, proud,

and queenly, she lived with the king for fourteen years, and bore him

eight children. These children were openly legitimated by Louis, and were

married by him to members of the royal family. He even contemplated

securing the throne to them, though they were thus doubly adulterine.

The last mistress of Louis XIV. was the famous Madame de Maintenon, the

widow of the poet Scarron; a person of remarkable abilities, and old

enough to have recovered from the passions which were said to have

disturbed her youth. She was introduced to the king as the governess of

his illegitimate children, and by her arts contrived not only to wean the

king's heart from his mistress, but even to alienate the children from

their mother. For thirty-five years she wielded supreme control over

Louis's mind; and whatever may be said of her early life, and however

harsh a judgment must be formed of her political measures, it must be

allowed that, in general, her influence was exercised for the good of

religion and morality. Under her direction the court became positively

devout. Intrigues were concealed, not ostentatiously paraded before the

public eye; and the ladies by whom she was surrounded were obliged to lead

at least outwardly decorous lives. She might not be able to check the

monstrous practices of the Duke of Orleans; but much of the looseness of

the court she could, and really did bring to an end. Her royal lover, who

at first piqued himself upon rising as far above obligations of fidelity

to his mistresses as he considered himself superior to political

obligations to his people, resigned himself to the spiritual direction of

the marquise, and allowed old age to assert its rights in condemning him

to virtue. All things considered, the last twenty years of Louis XIV.'s

reign was perhaps the most moral in the whole history of the monarchy.

This is well illustrated in the history of the literature of the day. The

leading philosophers, writers, and poets of the age of Louis XIV. forbore

to shock decency, and may be read to-day as safely as any modern work.

Preachers--Bossuet, Massillon, Bourdaloue--exercised a potent influence

over the tone of letters and society. Corneille, Racine, and their

contemporaries provided the stage with a repertory that could never bring

a blush to the cheek. Even Molière, who did occasionally let slip a joke

of questionable propriety, for the pit's sake, seems a daring innovator

when he is contrasted with his predecessors. Decency is, in fact, one of

the most striking characteristics of the literature of the age.

We may also date from the reign of Louis XIV. the final extinction of many

of the old feudal rights which were at war with morality. Horrible as it

may seem, there were parts of France where the custom allowed the seigneur

to debauch the daughter of his vassal without obstacle or penalty. In some

provinces it is said to have been customary for the seigneur to enjoy the

first night of every girl married within his manor. In others, the

peculiar authority of the seigneur over the serfs who were attached to the

glebe was held to endow him with the right of using the bodies of their

wives and daughters as he saw fit. No written custom justified these

monstrous privileges, but frequent allusions to them in the old French

writers show that in certain parts they were sanctioned by usage. Louis

XIV. made it his especial business to break down the privileges of the

nobility, and it was no doubt to the general police regulations he made

for the government of the kingdom at large that the extinction of these

rights was mainly due.

With the Regency the scene changes. The Duke of Orleans had long been one

of the most depraved men in France. So long as Louis XIV. lived he had

perforce observed a certain outward decorum; but the death of the

monarch, and the duke's high-handed seizure of the regency, enabled him to

give free scope to his propensities. He resided in the Palais Royal, and

gave suppers there almost every evening to a select circle of roués and

fast women, among whom Madame de Parabère long held the place of honor.

The company not unfrequently varied the entertainment by the performance

of charades and tableaux, among which the judgment of Paris was a favorite

of the regent. The conversation of the guests was so gross as to shock all

but the initiated, and when they separated they were generally all

intoxicated.[197]

The most startling and horrible feature of these entertainments was the

fact that the regent's daughter, the Duchess of Berri, was almost always

present. Her life was a romance. Married while a child to the Due de

Berri, by her passionate temper and her levities she was the bane of her

husband's life. She embraced the infidel and licentious doctrines of the

age in company with her father, and the pair were so fond of each other

that the most horrible suspicions began to gain ground. They were

dispelled for a time by the discovery of an intrigue between the duchess

and her chamberlain, which so provoked the duke that he seized his wife by

the hair and beat her. On his death, which occurred soon afterward, she

gave the reins to her passion, and set an example of scandal. At the

Luxembourg, where she had apartments, she exhibited the state of a queen,

and lover succeeded lover with startling rapidity. At last she seems to

have fallen in love with an officer of her guards, named Riom, whose only

merit was youth. He subdued her. She became as docile and submissive to

him as she had been intractable and haughty with her former lovers, and

all Paris was talking of the transformation. After about a year of this

_liaison_, she gave birth to a child. During the pains of childbirth she

was not expected to live, and the curate of St. Sulpice was sent for in

all haste to administer the extreme unction. The ecclesiastic happened to

be a rigid champion of morality, and he refused to administer the rite

till Riom had been dismissed from the Luxembourg. The duchess would not

consent to part with her lover, and for many hours this strange conflict

went on by the bedside of the failing woman. The curate was obstinate,

however, and no sacrament was administered; but the duchess recovering,

the regent used his authority, and sent Riom to join his regiment. It

killed his daughter. She invited her father to sup with her, and used all

her eloquence to persuade him to let her marry Riom; but the regent

remaining firm, she withdrew to her chamber, took to her bed, and died two

days afterward.

In alluding to the regent's mistresses, a word should be said of the

famous Claudine du Tencin, whose adventures shed a flood of light on the

morals of the day. She was a pretty girl, of respectable, if not noble

family, living in a distant province. To escape from a marriage that was

forced on her, she took refuge in a convent. Instead, however, of suiting

her habits to her place of residence, she contrived to alter the mode of

life at the convent so as to meet her desires, and it became famous for

the gayety of its social entertainments and the liveliness of its inmates.

One of the gentlemen who were allowed to share its hospitality was the

poet Destouches. He was smitten with the pretty Claudine, who acknowledged

the charm of his accomplishments, and, after a few months' intimacy, gave

birth to a male child, who became the mathematician and philosopher

D'Alembert.

Claudine had a brother, an abbé, a man of considerable cunning, and no

principle whatever. He persuaded his sister to go to Paris and seek her

fortune. He obtained an introduction for her to the regent, and Claudine

contrived to produce such an impression that she was soon installed as

titular mistress. This did not last long, however. One day, venturing to

remonstrate with the regent on his loose mode of life, his habitual

drunkenness, etc., her lover lost patience with her, and suddenly summoned

a crowd of his courtiers from the ante-chamber to witness the déshabillé

and listen to the sermons of madame. In revenge, Claudine rushed out and

became the mistress of the prime minister, Cardinal Dubois. Her brother,

the abbé, got a bishopric for his share in the transaction.

At the death of Dubois, Madame du Tencin gave him as successor the Duke of

Richelieu, the most famous lady-killer of the court. But she was growing

old, and ambition had more attractions for her than love. She became an

authoress, wrote religious works and novels, patronized letters, and

brought out Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws. Her salons became the most

fashionable in Paris. It was not a little singular that she should have

been the head of one literary clique, and her son, D'Alembert, the chief

of another--neither positively jealous of the other, yet living on terms

of cold reserve.

Louis XV. trod in the steps of his great-grandfather and the regent. His

amours attracted no attention, being evanescent and trifling, till he

quarreled with the queen, and bestowed the title of mistress on the

Countess of Mailly. This lady had four sisters, three of whom had reached

womanhood. They were jealous of their sister's success, and solicited a

share of the royal favor. The monarch graciously granted their prayer, and

admitted all four into an associate _liaison_. He was much hurt when the

fifth, at the age of sixteen, declined an interest in this delectable

partnership. Falling ill soon afterward, he allowed his confessor to

frighten him into parting with the sisters, and when he got well replaced

them by the wife of the subfarmer of the finances, Madame le Normand

d'Etoiles. He created her Marquise de Pompadour, and compelled the court

to recognize her. Happily for him, she was a person of moderate taste and

habits. She patronized letters, was the friend of Voltaire, and seems to

have employed her influence over the king for his advantage and that of

the public. It is recorded, as an instance of the heartlessness of the

king, that when she died he stood at a window to watch her funeral pass,

and noticing that it was a rainy day, observed, with a smile, "that the

marquise had bad weather for her long journey."

Her successor was Madame Dubarry, a common prostitute, fished out of the

Paris stews in consequence of her skill in debauchery. Her real name was

Vanbernier; but, in order to present her at court, a nobleman of the name

of Dubarry was persuaded to marry her. It was under her reign that the

_Parc aux Cerfs_ (in which Madame de Pompadour was said to have had a

hand), reached its highest point of celebrity and eclat. This was a royal

seraglio filled with the most beautiful girls that could be bought or

stolen. The monstrous old debauchee who filled the throne of France had a

weakness for very young girls, fifteen being the age at which he preferred

his mistresses. Under the skillful directions of Dubarry, a host of pimps

and purveyors searched France for young girls to suit the king's fancy.

Where negotiations could not be effected, the prerogative was stretched,

and the police authorities judiciously blinded; but we are led to believe

that it was seldom necessary to resort to these violent measures, and that

French fathers of that day seldom made difficulties except about the sum

to be paid. That the king was liberal may be inferred from the sum which

this seraglio cost him--not less than one hundred millions of francs. It

was a large, handsomely furnished building at Versailles, giving every

woman her separate apartments. The king rarely visited each one more than

three or four times; but, on the occasion of his first visit, he prided

himself on observing the etiquette of a husband. He insisted on the poor

child whom he was about to ruin kneeling down by the bedside, and saying

her prayers in his presence. It need hardly be observed that the Parc aux

Cerfs was the great reservoir from whence the brothels of the time derived

their supply of recruits. After a residence of a few weeks or months, in

case they became pregnant, the poor children were thrown out upon the

world, and ruin was a necessity.

The last monarch of the old French line, the unfortunate Louis XVI., forms

a bright contrast to his predecessors. His education had been severe, his

principles were naturally strict. Placed upon the throne after the

Revolution had become inevitable, his whole attention was devoted to the

business of reigning, and attempting reforms which came quite too late.

Neither he nor his wife ever gave rise to merited scandal.

The profligate character of the court was, however, sustained by the

Orleans family and their connections. Philippe Egalité was a true

descendant of the regent. On the very eve of the Revolution he indulged in

orgies that were closely imitated from those of the Palais Royal.

Our sketch of the immoralities of the French court naturally ends here.

Though the period of the Directory was marked by a general looseness in

the best French society, and both Napoleon and Louis XVIII. set no example

of conjugal fidelity to their subjects, yet vice was not exhibited so

openly under them as it had been under former kings, and the laws of

decency were not actually set at defiance. Their frailties were private

matters, into which it is scarcely the duty of the historian to intrude.

The same may be said of Charles X. and Louis Philippe. The former had, in

his youth, been a sharer of many of the excesses of the Orleans family,

but at the time he became king he was an old man, and could afford to lead

a decent life. Louis Philippe had never afforded a theme for scandal, and

as king he set an example of rigorous morality.

If we turn back now to the period of the Regency, we shall find letters

sympathizing in the most marked manner with the court. Under the regime of

severe etiquette and decency established by Louis XIV., authors respected

the ear of innocence; under the brutal sway of the regent, and the lewd

influence of the satyr Louis XV., the old prostitution of literature was

revived. Thus we find that the most successful authors of the day, such as

Voltaire, handled themes grossly immoral in themselves, and rendered still

more offensive by their mode of treatment. The most popular novel of the

eighteenth century--Manon Lescant--the work, by the way, of an abbé, is

the narrative of the adventures of a prostitute. Of all the romance

writers of that age, no one was more widely popular or more generally read

than Crebillon _fils_, whose works would almost fall into the hands of the

police at the present time. Diderot, Mirabeau, Montesquieu, and, with few

exceptions, all the most eminent men of France, prostituted their genius

to the composition of erotic works which were widely read by women as well

as men. Of the light poetry of the eighteenth century very little is fit

for modern reading, the poets being, as a general rule, either dull or

depraved. Nor were the arts behindhand. Frescoes differing but little from

those which had adorned Fontainebleau under Francis I. again covered the

walls of rich men's houses; and the most fortunate painters of the day

were those who could best outrage decency without positively suggesting

the brothel. Lewd books and pictures were freely sold in Paris during the

Regency, the reign of Louis XV., and the Revolutionary period. Napoleon

burned all he could find, but there still remained enough to supply the

demand almost ever since.

It should be noticed in connection with the state of morals in France

during the second half of the eighteenth century, that the tendency of the

philosophical doctrines which were then current was to undermine the

respect paid to marriage and chastity. The former, being a sacrament, was

assailed as part of the ecclesiastical system; the latter was conceived to

be at war with the natural, and, therefore, the proper passions of

mankind. Several of the philosophers left it to be inferred from their

writings, or stated broadly, that promiscuous intercourse, or, at all

events, unlimited facilities of divorce, were the natural destiny of the

human race, and that the restrictions which have been imposed on sensual

gratification had no warrant in reason or sound ethics. These foolish

notions brought forth fruits after their kind. Under the Directory,

prostitutes were received into certain societies, and ladies of fashion

became prostitutes. Even under the Empire it was not unusual for a lady to

request her husband to pay her a visit, as it was well, perhaps, to avoid

questions of legitimacy arising at any future period.

There was one branch of society in which morality had made great progress

during the century: that was the Church. It still contained cardinals like

Dubois, and bishops and abbés like Du Tencin, but the vast body of the

country clergy led pure moral lives. This point is placed beyond a doubt

by the silence of the parties opposed to the hierarchy when the Revolution

broke out, and they were so disposed to assail the priesthood on every

vulnerable point. It may be broadly stated that the vices which had

infected the whole body of the clergy during the sixteenth century had

disappeared by the eighteenth; despite the law of celibacy, the country

curates were, as a rule, moral, austere, virtuous men.

CHAPTER IX.

FRANCE.--SYPHILIS.

First recorded Appearance in Europe.--Description by Fracastor.--

Conduct of the Faculty.--First Hospitals in Paris.--Shocking Condition

of the Sick.--New Syphilitic Hospital.--Plan of Treatment.--

Establishment of the Salpétrière.--Bicêtre.--Capuchins.--Hospital du

Midi.--Reforms there.--Visiting Physicians.--Dispensary.--Statistics

of Disease.--Progress and Condition of Disease.

It properly belongs to this chapter to allude to the rise and progress of

the diseases termed syphilitic.

Whether they were of ancient date--whether the "shameful diseases" which

have been mentioned in the chapter devoted to prostitution at Rome were

the same as the modern syphilis--may be decided by the reader. It will

suffice here to say that, throughout the Middle Ages, a species of

disease, termed sometimes leprosy, sometimes _pudendagra_, appears to have

prevailed in France as in other European countries, and to have chosen for

its chief seat the organs of generation. It was not, however, till the

close of the fifteenth century that public attention began to be generally

directed to the subject of sexual disease.