VI. FRANCE.--HISTORY DURING THE MIDDLE AGES…

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.

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.

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.

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.

We shall briefly enumerate the earliest notices of its appearance. When Charles VIII. entered Naples in 1495, he found the city suffering from a plague (syphilis) to which the prejudice of the natives gave the name of "French malady." Italy, said the writers of the day, was attacked simultaneously by the French army and this new disease.[198] Most of the Italian writers accuse the French of its introduction. Benevenis, however, says they got it from the Spaniards, and Guicciardini candidly admits that his countrymen were the real propagators of the malady. German physicians likewise traced its origin to Naples, and placed it about the year 1493,[199] ascribing it to an untoward planetary conjunction. The disease appeared at Barcelona in 1493, and in other parts of Spain in the following year.[200] But sixty years before, in 1430, public regulations had been made in London to prevent the admission of persons attacked with a disease very similar to syphilis into houses of prostitution, and requiring the police to keep constant watch over such as should show symptoms of this infirmitas nefanda.[201] The first authentic allusion to the disease in France is the ordinance of the Parliament of Paris, dated 1497, ordering all persons attacked by the "large pox" to vacate the city within twenty-four hours, and not to return till they were cured; providing a sort of hospital for those who can not move; and appointing agents to bestow four sols parisis on the exiles to pay for their journey.[202] This ordinance alludes to the disease having been prevalent for two years.

It may therefore be taken for granted that, whether syphilitic diseases had existed before or not, they prevailed to a very alarming extent throughout Europe at the close of the fifteenth century.

To prevent misconception, it may be as well to give the diagnostic signs of the "French malady" as furnished by Fracastor: "The patients were in low spirits, and broken down; their faces were pale. Most of them had chancres upon the organs of generation. These chancres were obstinate; when cured in one place they reappeared in another, and the work was never ended. Pustules with a hard surface appeared upon the skin, generally on the head first. On first appearing they were small, but gradually increased to the size of an acorn, which they resembled in shape. In some cases they were dry, in others humid; some were livid, others white and pale, others again hard and reddish. They burst after a few days, and discharged an incredible quantity of vile fetid humor. When they began to suppurate they became true phagedænic ulcers, consuming both flesh and bone. When they attacked the upper part of the body they gave rise to malign fluxions, which gnawed away the palate, or the windpipe, or the throat, or the tonsils. Some patients lost their lips, others the nose, others the eyes, others the whole organs of generation. Many were troubled with moist tumors on the limbs, which grew as large as eggs or small loaves. When they burst, a white and mucilaginous liquor exuded from them. They were usually found on the legs and arms. Some were ulcerated, others again remained callous to the last. And, as if this was not enough, the patients suffered terrible pains, especially at night, not only in the articulations, but in the limbs and nerves. Some sufferers, however, had pustules without pains, others pains without pustules; but, in most cases, both occurred together. The patients were languid, had no appetite, desired to remain constantly in bed. The face and legs swelled. Some had a slight fever, but this was rare; others had severe headaches for which no remedy could be found."[203]

At first, it seems, the faculty, strangely misapprehending its duties, refused to treat patients assailed by this new plague. As at Rome, they were left to the tender mercies of quacks, barbers, and old women. About the beginning of the sixteenth century, however, the extent of the mischief provoked sympathy from the physicians, and one or two treatises appeared on the subject. Sudorifics seem to have been the chief agent employed. Large use was made of holy wood (the wood of the lignum-vitæ-tree), which was imported from America for the purpose. It was doses of holy wood, in decoction, which are said to have saved the life of the great Erasmus.

After the passage of the law of 1497, a house in the Faubourg St. Germain was appropriated to the reception of the victims of syphilis; but there is no reason to believe that any attempt was made to treat them there. They were left to die, or to quack themselves. Eighteen years after, in 1505, the house in question being too small for the numbers of the sick, and it being clearly shown that syphilis was not contagious except by sexual intercourse or positive peculiar contact with the person afflicted, a new decree of Parliament appropriated funds for the construction of "a hospital for persons attacked by the large pox (les grands vérolés)," and directed that they should be properly cared for.[204] This decree was never carried into effect. Thirty years afterward the condition of the sick was far worse than it had ever been, they being left to die in the streets. A new decree, in 1535, appointed commissioners to choose a locality for a hospital; and, notwithstanding some opposition from the religious authorities, they performed their task. A small hospital was appropriated to syphilitic patients, and persons suffering from itch, epilepsy, and St. Vitus's dance. It was soon filled, and several patients were thrust into the same bed. Owing to mismanagement on the part of the directors, it was short of linen, lint, and medicine. The Parliament interfered, but without success; and, in despair, the unfortunate sufferers contrived to effect an entrance into the hospital general, the Hotel Dieu. They were soon admitted on the same terms as other sufferers; but, as the establishment was far too small to accommodate all who sought refuge there, they were thrust four and five together into the same bed, and persons with syphilitic diseases lay by the side of men in contagious fevers, and others with broken legs and arms.

The Parliament interfered a second time. The municipal officers of Paris were assembled, and called upon to provide a hospital for venereal cases; but for many years the strenuous opposition of the Hotel Dieu neutralized all the efforts that were made. It was not till 1614 that the project of the Parliament was realized, and a syphilitic hospital actually opened.

Up to this time, that is to say, for a period of a century and a quarter, persons attacked by venereal disease were left to the care of Providence. Males could, with some exertion, occasionally obtain admission to the Hotel Dieu, where they often contracted new diseases without getting rid of the old; but of females, not a word had yet been spoken. No one in that hundred and twenty-five years had ever raised a voice to plead on behalf of the prostitutes; it never seems to have occurred, even to the Parliament which had so much sympathy for the pauvres vérolés, that the women likewise deserved pity and attention.

We possess no information with regard to the treatment used in this new hospital. It is certain, however, that, in obedience to the law of its foundation, patients were soundly whipped when they entered and when they left it, by way of punishing them for having contracted the disease. In 1675 the managers of the hospital declared that this practice deterred many sick persons from coming forward and confessing their condition; but it prevailed, apparently, for a quarter of a century afterward.

About the middle of the seventeenth century, under the reign of Louis XIV., a hospital prison, named the Salpétrière, was established for the reception of prostitutes; but, by a strange inconsistency, in 1658 it was closed to women suffering from syphilis (femmes gatées), and physicians were directed to examine all women "who showed symptoms of syphilis on the face." A few years' experience showed the fallacy of this system. Diseased women were confined in the place; should they not be treated there? The physicians thought they should, and accordingly, though in violation of the rules of the establishment, a small room was appropriated to this class of patients. It appears that at this time a prostitute found some difficulty in obtaining admission to the Salpétrière; it being not unusual for unfortunate creatures to have themselves arrested for vagabondage, and to submit voluntarily to the whipping which the ethics of the day required in the case of females as well as males, in order to obtain medical treatment. It will be seen that our New York system can not claim the merit of originality. Prostitutes, in fact, flocked to the Salpétrière in such numbers that the room furnished by the connivance of the authorities was soon far too small to accommodate them. The hospital managers declared to the royal government that medical treatment was out of the question in so crowded an apartment, and that a putrid fever might be expected if better accommodations were not provided. In reply, the government placed at their disposal a ward in the hospital of Bicêtre.

This was in 1691. For nearly a hundred years afterward the severe cases of venereal disease were sent to Bicêtre, the milder ones kept at Salpétrière. Both establishments were a disgrace to humanity. The patients were cheated of the food allowed them, and supplied with cheap broth and cheese in its stead. No baths, and but few medicines were at their command. Their ward was filthy, close, and in ruin. Patients were often obliged to wait so long for medical attendance that their maladies became incurable. The air in which they lived was pestiferous, and no one could visit the hospital without being shocked at its aspect.[205] Medical men who saw the place expressed amazement that so many persons should exist in so small a room. Eight women slept in a bed, and in the room appropriated to those whose turn for treatment had not come, the patients slept by gangs, one half sleeping from 8 P.M. to 1 A.M., and the remainder from 1 A.M. to 7 A.M. The floor was covered with dirt and filth, and the windows were nailed down, for fear of their being broken if opened. There was but little linen, and that was in rags, and abominably dirty. One hundred persons only were treated at a time, fifty men and fifty women. A new batch was admitted to treatment every two months, and, as the hospital always contained from three to four hundred sufferers, some cases remained six or eight months without any treatment whatever. Many died before they reached the hands of the doctors. The diet was the same for all. Those who had not been admitted to treatment were supplied with coarse bread, cheese, rancid butter, and (very seldom) a little meat. The surgeons of Bicêtre usually made fortunes in a short time.[206]

If any thing farther were needed to characterize the hospital of Bicêtre in the eighteenth century, it would be the rules in virtue of which no diseased person could claim admission until a complete year had elapsed from the time of their first application, and every diseased person was turned out, whether ill or well, after six weeks' treatment. It was stated to M. Parent-Duchatelet that the average mortality was one hundred women and sixty men per annum.[207]

In 1787, Dr. Cullerier was appointed surgeon in charge of syphilitic cases at Bicêtre. He commenced his administration by denouncing the state of things he found there, and it is mainly from the memoires he addressed to the government that the preceding facts have been obtained. His representations seem to have met with but little success. In 1789, however, the bulk of the prisoners at Bicêtre were set free, and he immediately availed himself of the increased room to accommodate his patients.

The reform was so slight, or rather so vast a reform was needed, that the moment the attention of the republican government was drawn to the subject, it removed the syphilitic cases from the hospital of Bicêtre to the hospital of the Capuchins. That establishment was enlarged, and named the Hospital of the South (l'Hôpital du Midi). Gardens and baths were provided; ample wards permitted the classification of diseases; the food was of the best kind, and sufficient in quantity. This immense step was the work of the republican authorities.

It was, however, only the first of a series of reforms. Originally, men and women of all grades were admitted promiscuously. This led to grave inconveniences. The decorum of the hospital was frequently disturbed by the conduct of some of the men with regard to the prostitutes in the adjoining wards. To obviate this, a new hospital was set apart, under the reign of Charles X., for the reception of male patients only. It is the Hospital de Lourcine.

A still more serious trouble arose from the mixture of prostitutes with other women who, from the infidelity of their husbands, hereditary disease, or other causes, found themselves infected with syphilis. For some time complaints had been made on this head, but an accident, which occurred in 1828, compelled the authorities to act. The daughter of a professional nurse, residing in the vicinity of Paris, caught syphilis from a child her mother was nursing, who had inherited the disease. It took the shape of a virulent chancre on the palate, and the girl was sent to the Hospital du Midi for treatment. She found herself thrust among the vilest prostitutes, whose language and sentiments shocked her so terribly that she insisted on leaving the hospital at once. The physician on duty declined to grant her request, whereupon the poor girl contrived to get into the yard, and threw herself into a well. She was drowned, and on an autopsy of her corpse it appeared that she was a virgin. This dreadful incident aroused the public mind. Hitherto the disposal of the prostitutes had been a subject of dispute between the administration of the hospital and that of the city, each wishing to thrust them upon the other. The government now interfered, and special accommodation was provided for prostitutes at the prison of Saint Lazare. The Hospital du Midi was devoted exclusively to such women as were not inscribed on the rolls of the police.

Before these distributions took place, when men and women were indiscriminately received at the Hospital du Midi, the average annual admissions, from 1804 to 1814, were 2700; from 1822 to 1828 it exceeded an average of 3100. Twenty years ago the mortality was said to be less than two per cent.; it was ten per cent. at Bicêtre.

At the Hospital du Midi, diseased persons who do not desire admission to the hospital are treated outside, all the medicines they require being furnished them free of charge.

It would appear, from stray allusions in various old ordinances, that some sort of medical office had been established in the eighteenth century by the government, for the purpose of affording gratuitous advice to prostitutes, and denouncing those who were diseased; but there exists no positive evidence of any such establishment or office. It was not till 1803 that a regulation was made by the prefect of police, requiring all public women to submit to be visited by a physician appointed by him. The plan was a bad one, as the physician was paid by fees which he was authorized to exact; and it was rendered worse in practice by the dishonesty of the man chosen for the office, one Coulon. This individual made money and neglected his duties. The system was altered in 1810, and a dispensary established, with a strong medical staff, who were directed to visit all the prostitutes in Paris. This institution is still in existence; it will be further noticed in the next chapter.

When the dispensary was established, its medical officers were directed to offer to prostitutes the choice of being treated at home or going to the hospital. Almost all chose the former. The physicians then undertook to decide themselves which should go to the hospital and which remain in their houses. The results of their experience, and the policy it compelled them to adopt, are shown in the following table, which was compiled by Parent-Duchatelet:

Year. Treated at home. 1812 276 1813 300 1814 296 1815 No report. 1816 " 1817 123 1818 No report. 1819 25 1820 19 1821 27 1824 27 1825 7 1826 4

The system of treating prostitutes at home was, in fact, given up. It was found they could not be compelled to take the medicines given them; and that, though laboring under the most severe disease, they would not abstain from the exercise of their calling.

The tables prepared by the sanitary office, or dispensary, at Paris, afford a clear view of the extent and progress of disease in that city. Of those which are furnished by M. Parent-Duchatelet, we shall take a few of the most striking. The following gives the aggregate disease for a period of twenty years:

Years. Average Total. Patients. Patients. 1812 51 612 1813 79 948 1814 102 1224 1815 Report missing. 1816 88 1056 1817 76 912 1818 68 816 1819 58 696 1820 62 744 1821 55 660 1822 Report missing. 1823 69 828 1824 84 1008 1825 81 972 1826 93 1116 1827 Report missing. 1828 104 1248 1829 99 1188 1830 91 1092 1831 110 1320 1832 78 936 ----- 17376 Add approximate estimate for three years wanting 3250 ----- Total diseased in twenty years 20626[208]

Other tables, apparently drawn with care, show that the proportion of disease to prostitutes varies widely in different years. In 1828 it was six per cent., that is to say, six out of every hundred prostitutes were diseased; but in 1832 it was barely three per cent. Four or five per cent. would seem a tolerably fair average.[209]

From another table compiled by the same author we gather that, during a period of eighteen years, January was found the most fatal month for prostitutes; next came August and September; while February, April, May, and July seemed seasons less favorable to disease. M. Duchatelet, however, candidly admits that he can trace the operation of no law here, and inclines to the belief that the variation is wholly due to chance.[210]

X. FRANCE.--PRESENT REGULATIONS

Number of Prostitutes in Paris.--Their Nativity, Parentage, Education, Age, etc.--Causes of Prostitution.--Rules concerning tolerated Houses.--Maisons de Passe.--Windows.--Keepers.--Formalities upon granting Licenses.--Recruits.--Pimps.--Profits of Prostitution.-- Inscription.--Interrogatories.--Nativity, how ascertained.-- Obstacles.--Principles of Inscription.--Age at which Inscription is made.--Radiation.--Provisional Radiation.--Statistics of Radiation.-- Classes of Prostitutes.--Visit to the Dispensary.--Visiting Physicians.--Punishment.--Offenses.--Prison Discipline.--Saint Denis.--Tax on Prostitutes.--Inspectors.--Bon Pasteur Asylum.-- (Note: Duchatelet's Bill for the Repression of Prostitution.)

It remains to describe the state and system of prostitution at Paris at the present day. The vast importance of the subject will doubtless justify the length at which it must be treated.

It was usual, during the last century, to estimate the number of prostitutes in Paris at twenty-five or thirty thousand. Even as late as 1810, the number was said by good authority to be not less than eighteen thousand.[211] The police rolls show that these calculations were wide of the mark. According to them, the average number of prostitutes inscribed had risen, from about 1900 in 1814, to 3558 in 1832, the last year of which we have any record. Assuming that the number at present is 4500, or thereabouts, which would suppose an increase equal to that noted before 1832, the prostitutes are one to every two hundred and fifty of the total population. Of these the city of Paris furnishes rather more than one third. The remainder come from the departments; those bordering on Paris being the most fruitful of prostitutes, and the north being largely in excess of production over the south.

The vast majority of these prostitutes are the children of operatives and mechanics. Of 828 fathers, there were

Weavers 19 Peddlers 12 Masons and Tilers 28 Water-carriers 11 Stage and Carriage Drivers 35 Shoemakers 50 Farmers and Gardeners 31 Servants 23 Individuals employed in Foundries, etc. 18 Day-laborers 113 Carpenters 31 Liquor-sellers 22 Smiths 23 Grocers and Fruit-sellers 18 Soldiers, on pensions 30 Clock-makers and Jewelers 16 Barbers and Hair-dressers 16 Persons without trade or calling 64 Tailors 22 Plasterers, Pavers, etc. 21 Coopers 11 Painters, Glaziers, and Printers 25

Whereas there were only

Surgeons, Physicians, and Lawyers 4 Teachers 3 Musicians 9

The inference drawn by M. Parent-Duchatelet from this is, that brothels are supplied from the classes of domestics and factory-girls; and that girls not bred to work rarely find their way into them. Rather more than one third of the fathers of these prostitutes were unable to sign their names.

Of the prostitutes born at Paris, about one fourth were illegitimate; of those born in the departments, one eighth were illegitimate.

Rather more than half the Paris prostitutes could not write their names; a degree of ignorance which argues very remarkable neglect on the part of parents, for at Paris every one may learn to write gratuitously, and a person who can not write will always experience difficulty in obtaining employment.

Nearly half the prostitutes were between the ages of twenty and twenty-six inclusive. One declared herself, or was proved to be, only twelve years old; thirty-four were over fifty; two were over sixty. On reference to the rolls of inscription, it appeared that the bulk of the prostitutes registered themselves between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two; but thirty-four were inscribed before the age of fourteen, which may be assumed to be the period of puberty in France, and a few after passing fifty.

The following table shows the number of years during which the Paris prostitutes had exercised their calling at the time the inquiry was made:

Time. Number of Prostitutes.

1 year and under 439 From 1 to 2 years 590 " 2 to 3 " 440 " 3 to 4 " 485 " 4 to 5 " 294 " 5 to 6 " 139 " 6 to 7 " 150 " 7 to 8 " 143 " 8 to 9 " 96 " 9 to 10 " 100 " 10 to 11 " 109 " 11 to 12 " 93 " 12 to 13 " 99 " 13 to 14 " 98 " 14 to 15 " 107 " 15 to 16 " 80 " 16 to 17 " 19 " 17 to 18 " 14 " 18 to 19 " 17 " 19 to 20 " 4 " 20 to 21 " -- " 21 to 22 " 1 " 22 to 23 " --

M. Duchatelet made careful inquiries into the causes of prostitution. He admits that, the difficulty of obtaining trustworthy information on this head being very great, many errors may have found their way into his calculations. He gives them, however, for what they may be worth.

Want 1441 Expulsion from home, or desertion of parents 1255 Desire to support old and infirm parents 37 " " " younger brothers and sisters, or nephews and nieces 29 Widows with families to support 23 Girls from the country, to support themselves 280 " " " " brought to Paris by soldiers, clerks, students, etc. 404 Servants seduced by masters and abandoned 289 Concubines abandoned by their lovers 1425 ---- Total 5183

It appears that there were in Paris, in 1832, two hundred and twenty "tolerated houses"--that is to say, brothels. The rules regarding these are numerous. They can not be established in certain localities, such as the Boulevards, or other great thoroughfares. They must not be within one hundred yards of a church, or within fifty or sixty yards of a school, whether for boys or girls; of a palace or other public building, or of a large boarding-house. The proprietor of the house must have given his consent before the house can be used as a brothel. Two houses can not be established side by side, much less can they have the same entry. As a general rule, a preference is given to small, narrow streets, especially culs de sac, and to places where brothels have been established before.

With regard to the interior of these houses, they must contain a room for each girl; on no account are two prostitutes allowed to occupy the same room, much less the same bed. Each room must, moreover, be amply provided with utensils, soap, and water, for ablution. No house of prostitution can have back or side doors, or in any way communicate with the adjoining buildings. No house can contain dark closets, or dark passages, or concealed hiding-places. In none of them can any trade or traffic be carried on.

With regard to the class of houses called maisons de passe (assignation houses), the police authorities require that in every such house two regular prostitutes, inscribed on the police rolls, shall live permanently. The object of this rule is to obtain a control and supervision over these houses. Before it was adopted the police was often embarrassed by denials of its authority to invade them. It is found that the prostitutes, being naturally hostile to the mistresses of the houses, will act as agents of the police in the event of any scandalous proceedings.

The windows of houses of prostitution must be roughed, as also must those of rooms where individual prostitutes live. They can only be partially opened. These regulations were made in consequence of the shocking scenes that were witnessed at the windows of brothels after the Revolution, naked women being the least of the scandals that used to be exposed.

No one can keep a house of prostitution in Paris without an authorization from the police. Men are never permitted to keep establishments of the kind. A woman who desires to open a house must apply in writing to the Prefect of Police. On receipt of her application, reference is made to the Commissary of Police of the ward to ascertain her character. If she has been condemned for crime or misdemeanor, her request is rarely granted. If she stands in the police books as a woman requiring supervision, she can not succeed. Nor can she obtain a license, under ordinary circumstances, unless she has been a prostitute herself. The reason of this regulation is obvious; no one but a prostitute understands the business thoroughly; and as the position of brothel-keeper is found to be the most demoralizing station in the world, it has been the policy of the Paris police to throw impediments in the way of persons not wholly depraved devoting themselves to so dangerous a calling. Furthermore, the applicant must have reached a certain age. She must also be of sober habits, and apparently possessed of sufficient force of character to be able to command a house full of prostitutes. She must possess a sum of money sufficient to guarantee her against immediate failure, and she must own the furniture in the house she wishes to keep.

When all these conditions are fulfilled, the applicant receives a pass-book, in which the number of girls she is allowed to keep is specified. In this book she is bound to enter the name of every prostitute she receives, whether as a boarder or a transient lodger; her age, the date of her entry into her house, the date of her inspection by a physician, and the date of her departure from the house. A printed form in the beginning of the pass-book reminds the mistress of the house that she is bound, under heavy penalties, to inscribe on the police rolls every girl she receives within twenty-four hours of her arrival.

In the event of the neglect of these rules by the keepers of houses of prostitution, the license is revoked. It is understood that the police enforce this regulation with due rigor.

Much has been said and written about the manner in which the keepers of houses of prostitution obtain recruits. M. Parent-Duchatelet, whose sources of information were the best, gives it as his opinion that most of the prostitutes are obtained from the hospitals, especially the Hospital du Midi, where female venereal diseases are treated. It appears that this hospital and others are haunted by old women who have been prostitutes, and who, in their old age, eke out a livelihood by enticing others into the same calling. They soon discover the antecedents and disposition of every young girl they find in hospitals; and if she be pretty or engaging, she must either have much principle or careful friends to rescue her from the clutches of the old hags. While she lies ill on a bed of pain, the latter are constantly with her, and gain her friendship. They know the devices that are needed to impose on her simplicity, and not unfrequently are enabled to strengthen their promises by small donations in money, or a weekly stipend during her convalescence. For a pretty girl as much as fifty francs will be paid by a brothel-keeper. As the girls in France, with few exceptions, come to Paris to be cured when they have contracted disease from association with lovers, it seems quite likely that, as M. Parent-Duchatelet supposes, these hospitals are a fruitful source of prostitutes.

Other brothel-keepers have female agents in the country towns, who send them girls. One well-known woman, who kept for many years one of the largest establishments in France, employed a traveling clerk with a large salary. Some obtain boarders from their own province or native city; others, who have followed a trade, get recruits from the acquaintances they made at the workshop. Latterly, it would seem, pimps have carried on their trade with unusual boldness and success. Some time since it was noticed that an uncommon number of girls arrived at Paris from Rheims. They all came provided with the name and address of the houses to which they were destined, and drove there from the stage-office. Information was sent to the police authorities of Rheims, and on their arrival the girls were sent back again. The design of the authorities was baffled for a while by the cunning of the pimps, who sent their recruits round by other roads; but the police finally triumphed by refusing, for a year or two, to inscribe any prostitutes from Rheims.

It is notorious, however, that the same traffic is carried on at the present day to an alarming extent between London and Paris, London and Brussels, and other large cities in the neighborhood. Several societies have been formed, and the police have made great exertions to suppress the trade, but without any particular success.

It is understood that the prostitutes of Paris receive nothing for their "labors" but their board, lodging, and dress. The latter is often expensive. In first-class houses it will exceed five hundred francs, which in female attire will go as far at Paris as five hundred dollars will in New York. The whole of the fees exacted from visitors goes to the mistress, and the girls are reluctantly permitted to retain the presents they sometimes receive from their lovers. They are usually in debt to the mistress, who, having no other means of retaining them under her control, hastens to advance them money for jewelry, carriages, fine eating, and expensive wines. No written contract binds them to remain where they are; they may leave when they please, if they can pay their debts; and the obligation they incur for the latter is one of honor only, and can not be enforced in the courts.

Houses of prostitution, when well conducted, are very profitable in Paris. It is estimated that the net profits accruing from each girl ought to be ten francs or more per day. Many keepers of houses have retired with from ten to twenty-five thousand francs a year, and have married their daughters well. The good-will of a popular house has been sold for sixty thousand francs (twelve thousand dollars).

We now come to the great feature of the Paris system: the inscription of prostitutes in a department of the Prefecture of Police, called the Bureau des Moeurs. It seems that some sort of inscription was in use before the Revolution, but no law referring to it, or records of the rolls, can be found. Various systems were employed during the Republic and the Empire. The one now in use was adopted in 1816, and amended by a police regulation of 1828.

Prostitutes are inscribed either

1. On their own request;

2. On the requisition of the mistress of a house; or,

3. On the report of the inspector of prostitutes.

When a girl appears before the bureau under any of these circumstances, she is asked the following questions, the answers being taken down in writing:

1. Her name, age, birth-place, trade, and residence?

2. Whether she is a widow, wife, or spinster?

3. Whether her father and mother are living, and what their calling was or is?

4. Whether she lives with them, and if not, when and how she left them?

5. Whether she has had children, and where they are?

6. How long she has been at Paris?

7. Whether any one has a right to claim her?

8. Whether she has ever been arrested, and if yes, how often, and for what offenses?

9. Whether she has ever been a prostitute before, and for what period of time?

10. Whether she has, or has had, venereal disease?

11. Whether she has received any education?

12. What her motive is in inscribing herself?

The answers to these inquiries suggest others, which are put at the discretion of the officials. Their practice is so great that they are rarely deceived by the women; M. Parent-Duchatelet affirms that they could tell an old prostitute merely by the way she sat down.

The interrogatory over, the girl is taken by an inspector to the Dispensary and examined, and the physician on duty reports the result, which is added to the inquiry. Meanwhile, the police registers have been consulted, and if the girl has been an old offender, or is known to the police, she is now identified.

If the girl has her baptismal certificate (extrait de naissance) with her, she is forthwith inscribed, and registered among the public women of Paris. As prostitutes rarely possess this document, however, a provisional inscription is usually effected, and a direct application is made to the mayor of the city or commune where she was born for the certificate. This application varies according to the age of the girl. If she is of age it is simply a demand for the "extrait de naissance of ---- ----, who says she is a native of your city or commune." If, on the contrary, she is a minor, the application states that "a girl who calls herself --------, and says she was born at ----, has applied for inscription in this office. I desire you to ascertain the position of her family, and what means they propose to take in case they desire to secure the return of this young girl."

It often happens that the family implore the intervention of the police; in that case the girl is sent back to the place whence she came. In many cases the family decline to interfere, and then the girl is duly inscribed on the register. She signs a document, in which she states that, "being duly acquainted with the sanitary regulations established by the Prefecture for Public Women, she declares that she will submit to them, will allow herself to be visited periodically by the physicians of the Dispensary, and will conform in all respects to the rules in force."

Of course this procedure is occasionally delayed by falsehoods uttered by the women. It often used to happen that the mayors would report that no person of the name given had been born at the time fixed in their city or commune. In that case the girl was recalled, and made to understand that truth was better policy than falsehood. Girls rarely held out longer than a fortnight or so, and, at the present time, the number of false declarations is very small indeed. They seem satisfied that the police are an omniscient machine which can not be deceived.

When the girl is brought to the office either by a brothel-keeper or an inspector, the proceeding is slightly varied. In the latter case she has been arrested for indulging in clandestine prostitution, but she almost invariably denies the fact, and pleads her innocence. The rule, in this case, is to admonish her and let her go. It is not till the third or fourth offense has been committed that she is inscribed. When the mistress of a house brings a girl to the office, interrogatories similar to the above are put to her. If she has relations or friends at Paris, they are sent for and consulted. When the girl appears evidently lost, she is duly inscribed; but if she shows any signs of shame or contrition, she is often sent home by the office at the public expense. It need hardly be said that when a girl is found diseased she is sent to hospital and her inscription held over. It occasionally happens that virgins present themselves at the office and desire to be inscribed; in their case the officials use compulsion to rescue them from infamy.

In a word, the Paris system with regard to inscriptions is to inscribe no girl with regard to whom it is not manifest that she will carry on the calling of a prostitute whether she be inscribed or not.

From the following table, prepared by M. Parent-Duchatelet from the records of a series of years, it appears that the mistresses of houses inscribe over one third of the total prostitutes:

Girls inscribed at their own request 7388 " " by mistresses of houses 4436 " " by inspectors 720 ----- Total 12544

The age at which girls can be inscribed has varied under different administrators. Under one it was seventeen, under his successor eighteen, under the next twenty-one years; but now the general rule is that no girl should be inscribed under the age of sixteen. Exceptions to this rule are made in the case of younger girls--of thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen, who lead a life of prostitution, and are frequently attacked by disease. From a regard to public health, they are inscribed notwithstanding their age.

Only second in importance to the subject of inscription is that of "radiation," the obliteration of an inscription. This is the process by which a prostitute takes leave of her calling, throws off the control of the police, and regains her civil rights. At Rome, as has been shown already, no such formality as radiation was known to the law; once a prostitute, always a prostitute, was the Roman rule. This system did not long sustain the test of a Christian examination.

The policy of the French Bureau des Moeurs on this head is governed by two very simple maxims: 1st. The amendment of prostitutes ought to be encouraged as much as possible; 2d. But no prostitute should be released from the supervision of the police and the visits of the Dispensary physicians until there is reasonable ground for believing that her repentance and alteration of life are sincere and likely to be permanent.

A person desiring to have her name struck from the rolls of public women must make a written application, specifying her reasons for desiring to change her mode of life, and indicating the means of support on which she is henceforth to rely. In three cases the demand is granted forthwith: 1st. When the girl proves that she is about to marry; 2d. When she produces the certificate of a physician that she is attacked by an organic disease which renders it impossible for her to continue the calling of a prostitute; and, 3d. When she has gone to live with her relations, and produces evidence of her late good behavior.

In all other cases the office awards a "provisional radiation." For a period of time, which varies, according to circumstances, from three months to a year, the girl is still under the supervision of the police, such supervision being obviously secret and discreet. When the girl passes triumphantly through this period of probation, her name is definitely struck from the roll of prostitutes.

When a girl, after having her name thus struck out, desires to be inscribed afresh, her request is granted without delay or inquiry, it being wisely supposed that she has repented of her decision. A re-inscription also takes place when a girl, after radiation, is found in a house of prostitution even as a servant.

A prostitute is struck from the rolls by authority of the office when she has disappeared, and no trace of her has been found for three months.

M. Parent-Duchatelet gives the following table of radiations, which, taken in connection with the table already given of the number of prostitutes registered, shows the movement of reform:

+------------------------------------------+ | | Women struck off the Rolls of | | | Prostitutes | |Years.|-----------------------------------| | | At their |In consequence| | | |own request.| of absence. | Total.| |------|------------|--------------|-------| | 1817 | 485 | 575 | 1060 | | 1818 | 477 | 582 | 1059 | | 1819 | 469 | 571 | 1040 | | 1820 | 415 | 716 | 1131 | | 1821 | 433 | 733 | 1166 | | 1822 | 417 | 739 | 1156 | | 1823 | 502 | 605 | 1107 | | 1824 | 442 | 602 | 1044 | | 1825 | 456 | 527 | 983 | | 1826 | 486 | 554 | 1040 | | 1827 | 490 | 542 | 1032 | | 1828 | 572 | 415 | 987 | | 1829 | 298 | 536 | 834 | | 1830 | 334 | 502 | 836 | | 1831 | 284 | 452 | 736 | | 1832 | 449 | 718 | 1167 | | |------------|--------------|-------| | | 7009 | 9369 | 16378 | +------------------------------------------+

Once inscribed, prostitutes are divided into three classes:

1st. Those who live in a licensed or "tolerated" brothel.

2d. Those who live alone in furnished rooms.

3d. Those who live in rooms which they furnish, and outwardly bear no mark of infamy.

In the eye of the law there is no difference between the three classes; all are equally subject to police and medical supervision. Every girl that is inscribed receives a card bearing her name, and the number of her page in the register; a blank column of this card is left to be filled by a memorandum of the date of each visit by the physicians of the Dispensary.

But the three classes differ in respect of the place where they are visited. The Dispensary physicians visit the inmates of brothels in the houses where they live; all other prostitutes visit them at the Dispensary. Yet another visit is made by the Dispensary physicians to the Dépôt, or Lock-up, at the Prefecture of Police; as there are always a certain number of prostitutes arrested for drunkenness or disorderly conduct every night, it was thought well to seize the opportunity of their confinement to inquire into the state of their health.

All houses of prostitution are visited by the Dispensary physicians once a week; the hour of the visit is known beforehand, and every girl must be present and pass inspection. The examination is private; the result is noted in a "folio" kept by the physician, and a corresponding memorandum is made in the pass-book of the house and on the card of the prostitute. When disease is detected, the mistress of the house is notified, and cautioned not to allow the girl diseased to receive any visitors. That afternoon, or the next morning, she comes or is brought to the Dispensary, where she undergoes a second examination, and, if the result is the same as at the first, she is forthwith sent to Saint Lazare for treatment.

Free prostitutes, that is to say, those who live in lodgings or rooms furnished by themselves, are bound to visit the Dispensary, and submit to examination once a fortnight. They choose the time and day themselves, but more than a fortnight must not elapse between the visits.

It appears, from tables published by M. Parent-Duchatelet, that these rules are strictly enforced. Free prostitutes are visited nearly thirty times a year, and prostitutes in tolerated houses more than fifty times. We have alluded elsewhere to the results of the visits.

Experience has proved that the only safe method of punishment for prostitutes is imprisonment. Formerly they were whipped, and at a later date their hair was cut off; but the humane spirit of modern legislation has rejected both these punishments as unduly cruel. At the present day, offenses against the rules concerning prostitution (delits de prostitution) are punished by imprisonment; misdemeanors and crimes provided against by the code being within the cognizance of the ordinary courts in the case of prostitutes as well as other persons.

Delits de prostitution have been divided by the Bureau des Moeurs into two classes, slight offenses and grave offenses; slight offenses are:

1. To appear in forbidden places.

2. To appear at forbidden hours.

3. To get drunk, and lie down in doorways, streets, or other thoroughfares.

4. To demand admittance to guard-houses.

5. To walk through the streets in daylight in such a way as to attract the notice of people passing.

6. To rap on the windows of their rooms.

7. To absent themselves from the medical inspection.

8. To beg.

9. To remain more than twenty-four hours in their house, after having been pronounced diseased by the physician.

10. To escape from the Hospital or Dispensary.

11. To go out of doors with bare head or neck.

12. To remain in Paris after having been ordered to leave, and presented with a passport.

This class of offenses is punished by imprisonment for not less than a fortnight or more than three months. One month is the usual term.

A prostitute is held to be guilty of grave offenses when she

1. Insults outrageously the visiting physician.

2. Fails to visit the Dispensary.

3. Continues to prostitute herself after being pronounced diseased.

4. Uses obscene language in public.

5. Appears naked at her window.

6. Assails men with violence, and endeavors to drag them to her home.

These offenses are punished by imprisonment for not less than three months, and not more than a year, rarely more than six months. The time is fixed in these cases with reference to the former character of the prostitute.

When a prostitute is arrested she is taken to the Prefecture of Police, where there is a room specially appropriated to her class. She is tried within forty-eight, usually within twenty-four hours of her arrival. When condemned, she is conveyed in a close carriage or van to the prison.

The prison at Paris usually contains from four hundred and fifty to six hundred inmates. They are all obliged to work. A few are generally found incapable, either from idiocy, blindness, or incorrigible obstinacy, of performing even the simplest work. These are lodged in a department called "the ward of the imbeciles." The others are allowed to choose their work; the bulk naturally take to sewing. They are paid a small sum for what they do, partly as they proceed with the work, and the balance when they leave the prison. Industrious girls receive, from the money coming to them, from five to eight sous daily. That this, added to the ample food supplied by the prison, suffices for their wants, is proved by the frequent purchases they make of flowers and other superfluities. Formerly, prostitutes in prison were not expected to work, and at this period fights and disturbances were of constant occurrence. Now the discipline is excellent and the prisoners orderly. The only penalty for disobedience of rules or misconduct is close confinement in the cachot.

M. Parent-Duchatelet admits that the prison discipline is so gentle that the punishment has no terrors for prostitutes. It is quite common to find girls who have been thirty times condemned to imprisonment. He recommends the use of the tread-mill as a corrective.

His experience led him to question the utility of nuns and priests in the prostitutes' prison. He does not think they do any good, and inclines to the belief that the counsels and visits of married women, who look rather to the moral than religious reform of the women, would be productive of more benefit.

The old practice in France was to admit visitors to the prostitutes' prison at certain hours and in a certain room, but this was found to be productive of great evils. The scenes in the visitors' room were outrageous, and a new system was accordingly adopted. No one was allowed to visit a prostitute but a bona fide relation, and even such a one was required to obtain a written permit from the Prefecture of Police.

A certain number of prostitutes are sent every year to the prison of St. Denis. These are those who, from physical or mental infirmities, such as recto-vaginal fistula, cancer, incurable organic disease, idiocy, etc., are incapacitated from pursuing their calling, and run risk of starvation. Not more than eight or ten of these are sent to St. Denis in the course of the year. The mortality among them there is not less than twenty-five per cent. per annum.[212]

Until a few years ago, a tax was levied on the Paris prostitutes for the support of the Dispensary. Each mistress of a house paid twelve francs per month; each girl living alone, three francs per month. A fine of two francs was also laid on all prostitutes who were behind their time in visiting the Dispensary. The product of these various taxes amounted to from seventy-five to ninety thousand francs per annum. The system was abolished on the ground of its immorality. A popular notion is said to have prevailed that the police received half a million or more from the tax on prostitution, and attacks on the administration in consequence were incessant. The police authorities gave way at last, and the municipal council of the city undertook to defray the cost of the Dispensary for the future. Similar taxes appear to have existed at Lyons, Strasbourg, and other cities.[213]

Allusion has been made to inspectors. At the time M. Parent-Duchatelet wrote there were ten inspectors, who had each charge of one tenth of the city. Their business was to see that the regulations governing prostitutes were carried out. They arrested offending women, and transferred them to the Prefecture of Police. In case of resistance, they summoned the aid of the ordinary police of the ward. They were not allowed themselves to use violence either to arrest or drag a girl to prison. They were usually picked men of good character. Their salary was twelve hundred francs a year, besides handsome presents.[214]

In conclusion, a word must be said of the establishment called the Bon Pasteur. It is a Magdalen Asylum established many years ago by some benevolent ladies, and now mainly supported by an annual vote from the city of Paris, and an allowance from the hospitals. It receives prostitutes who desire to reform; feeds, clothes, and instructs them; provides them with places when they desire to leave, or with work when they wish to remain in the establishment. The rule is that no prostitute can be received under eighteen or over twenty-five years of age. Beyond these limits it has been found that the humane efforts of the directresses of the establishment have rarely led to any result. No compulsion is used in any case by the managers. Girls are free to leave as they are free to come. So long as they remain, however, they must conform to the rules of the establishment, which are strict without being monastic. The average admissions to the asylum for the first twelve years of its existence were twenty per annum. The mortality among the residents was very large, being equal to twenty per cent. on the total number during the twelve years. Of the whole number (two hundred and forty-five), forty were dismissed for insubordination; twenty-seven left of their own accord, and probably returned to their old courses, and fifteen were returned to the police. The remainder were either restored to their families, or placed in situations in the hospitals or elsewhere.

Small as these numbers appear in comparison with the large army of prostitutes exercising their calling at Paris, it is not at all doubtful but the establishment is a useful one. No one can help but concur with M. Parent-Duchatelet when he observes that, "did it not exist, it would be necessary to create it."

NOTE.--As M. Parent-Duchatelet has written the best, we might almost say the only philosophical work on prostitution extant, it may be useful to subjoin the test of the statute which he proposed to regulate the subject of prostitution.

LAW RELATIVE TO THE REPRESSION OF PROSTITUTION.

Art. 1. The duty of repressing prostitution, whether with provocation on the public highway or otherwise, is intrusted at Paris to the Prefect of Police, and in all the other communes of France to the mayors respectively.

Art. 2. A discretionary authority over all persons engaged in public prostitution is vested in these functionaries, within the scope of their powers.

Art. 3. Shall constitute evidence of public prostitution either, 1st, direct provocation thereto on the public highway; 2d, public notoriety; or, 3d, legal proof adduced after accusation and trial.

Art. 4. The Prefect of Police at Paris, and the mayors in the other communes, shall make any and all regulations which they may deem suitable for the repression of prostitution, and such regulations shall bear upon all those who encourage prostitution as a trade--lodgers, inn-keepers and tavern-keepers, landlords and tenants.

Art. 5. The Dispensary at Paris for the superintendence of women of the town is placed on the same footing as the public health establishments. Other similar dispensaries may be established wherever they are needed.

Art. 6. A full report of the proceedings of these dispensaries shall be forwarded annually to the Minister of the Interior.

M. Duchatelet conceived this short law to be adequate for the purpose. It may be presumed that he took for granted that the mayors of the communes would never attempt to carry out original views of their own on the subject; he doubtless gave them credit for sufficient self-abnegation to adopt, without question, the elaborate and sensible plan which experience has taught the authorities of Paris. How far this assumption was justifiable appears uncertain, in view of the fact that at Lyons and Strasbourg, the prostitutional system has always differed from that of the capital. In both those cities a tax has been levied on prostitutes till a very late period; at Lyons it was exacted, it is believed, in 1842.

XI. ITALY

Decline of Public Morals.--Papal Court.--Nepotism.--John XXII.--Sextus IV.--Alexander VI.--Effect of the Reformation.--Poem of Fracastoro.-- Benvenuto Cellini.--Beatrice Cenci.--Laws of Naples.--Pragmatic Law of 1470.--Court of Prostitutes.--Bull of Clement II.--Prostitution in Lombardy and Piedmont.--Clerical Statute.--Modern Italy.--Laws of Rome.--Public Hospitals.--Lazaroni of Naples.--Italian Manners as depicted by Lord Byron.--Foundling Hospitals.--True Character of Italian People.

Birth-place of modern art and literature, dowered with the fatal heritage of beauty, Italy, in the varied passages of her career among the nations, has been as remarkable for the vice and sensuality of her children as she has been eminent for their talents and acquirements.

The heart of the historical student thrills with respectful sympathy over the sorrows and ennobling virtues of her patriots in all ages, or his intellect is captivated with enthusiastic admiration and reverence in considering the monuments of resplendent genius given to mankind by her sons. Let him turn the page, and his soul recoils in disgust and deepest horror from the narrative of corruption the most abandoned, ambition the most unscrupulous, lust the most abominable, crime the most tremendous, to which the history of the world scarcely offers a parallel, and which brands the perpetrators with the execration of all succeeding generations.

The most glorious era of the Italian republics immediately preceded their downfall. Like shining lights, they perished by their own effulgence. The mutual jealousies of Florence, Pisa, Genoa, Lucca, and the numerous independent cities and states, stirred up in them a "noble and emulous rage" to excel each other in the encouragement they gave to art and letters, and the mighty works produced by their respective citizens. But the same sentiment also roused them to deadlier feuds, and the common field of national patriotism being shut up, they exhausted themselves and each other by desperately-protracted struggles and incredible sacrifices of blood and treasure. Thus they paved the way to the introduction of the foreigner and the mercenary, who completed their ruin; until, in place of the small but illustrious republics which formed a diadem of brightest gems, arose a system of petty tyrants, who plunged the country into misery and degradation. These, in turn, were swept away by the strong arm of a despotism which has never since relaxed its grasp of this loveliest country of the earth.

No influence played a more important part in bringing about this catastrophe than that of the court of Rome. By the intrigues of the Roman pontiffs the mutual jealousies of the states were exacerbated and their quarrels fomented. While these results were caused by the political actions of the popes and their advisers, the worst effects were produced upon public manners and morals by their example. The abuses which had established themselves among the Roman hierarchy were the natural consequences of long and undisturbed enjoyment by the clergy of their vast immunities and privileges. The demoralization and dissoluteness which thus existed, and which spread its poison throughout the civilized world, but especially throughout Italy, are attested to posterity by all contemporary writers.

The enormous iniquity which distinguished such men as John XXII., Sextus IV., or Alexander VI., is notorious to all. Although the character of communities is not to be inferred from the actions of exceptional prodigies, either of virtue or vice, it is evident that the system which could place monsters like these in the august positions they filled must have been rotten to the core. The worth of a Leo X. or a Clement VII. consisted in the absence of the grosser vices rather than in any positive excellence, and the encouragement given by such men to objectionable practices did more to confirm a laxity of morals than the odious and unpardonable offenses of their predecessors.

Some of the political profligacy of the court of Rome, and, through its example, of the other Italian courts, was owing to the system which had sprung up of each pope providing for his family. The term nepote (nephew) was in common use as expressing the relationship which existed between the pope and the individuals selected for advancement. The priests of all denominations had nephews and nieces to provide for, and the abuses covered by the term were objects of the keenest satire. In fact, Innocent VIII. thus provided for eight openly avowed sons and daughters.[215] The pseudo-avuncular obligations of Sextus IV. were also well known. Other popes, whose sins were not in this particular direction, having no sons, adopted a bona fide nephew, and one or two, feeling the want of ties of kindred or family relationship, actually adopted strangers. In one instance, the Donna Olimpia, a niece by marriage, and "a lady of ability and a manly spirit," took the place of a nephew in the court of Innocent X., without any imputation on the character of either pope or niece.[216]

The effect produced by this example in high places, particularly upon the clergy, and through them on the community, can be imagined. By a decree of the Church in the eleventh session of the Lateran Council it appears that the clergy were accustomed to live in a state of public concubinage, nay, more, to allow others to do so for money paid to them by permission. Dante, in one of his daring flights, compares the papal court to Babylon, and declares it a place deprived of virtue and shame. In the nineteenth canto of the Inferno, Dante, visiting hell, finds Nicholas III. there waiting the arrival of Boniface, who again is to be succeeded by Clement.

The Reformation compelled some attention to morals among the clergy, and for a time an earnest endeavor was made at a purification of the Church. This was one of the chief labors of the famous Council of Trent. That council certainly did repress the abuses among the general clergy, but the law-makers were law-breakers. They could not touch the cardinals, archbishops, or the Pope himself, and thus little radical change was effected among the chief dignitaries.[217]

There are not wanting writers who acquit the Italian national character of blame in the matter, attributing the general corruption partly to the frightful example of foreign invaders. The invasion of Charles VIII., himself a dissolute monarch, with the universal licentiousness of the French troops, did undoubtedly contribute largely to ruin the morals of the people at large, but, to use the words of Machiavelli, "If the papal court were removed to Switzerland, the simplest and most religious people of Europe would, in an incredibly short time, have become utterly depraved by the vicious example of the Italian priesthood."[218]

The ecclesiastics did not confine themselves to licentiousness of conduct. The clerical writers are charged with a taste for that lowest practice of debased minds, obscenity, in which particular they exceed the lay writers. Roscoe, an accomplished Italian scholar and a man not given to railing, maintains this allegation.[219] This reminds us of Pope's lines:

"Immodest words admit of no defense, For want of decency is want of sense."

For the limited range of our present subject, history, so profuse of illustration of war, bloodshed, and the personal adventures of men noteworthy by their position or character, is exceedingly chary of materials. In the case of Italy the testimony as to the morals of men in high places is superabundant, and these and the legislative enactments of the period will furnish some of the information of which we are in search.

In the fifteenth century, Charles VIII., in his wars to gain Naples from the Spaniards, drew down unspeakable miseries upon the wretched Italians. His armies are reputed to have indulged in every excess of unbridled license and rapine; and it was during the siege of Naples that the venereal disease is said to have first made its appearance, although the particulars given of this malady in Chapter IX., under the head of France, show that syphilis existed in Naples two or three years before the siege. As generally happens with new diseases, whether from fear or ignorance of the means to control them, it was represented that the affliction was of a malignity never since known. Its frightful ravages and disgusting character impressed the minds of men with a belief that it was a new scourge, sent specially as a punishment for the debauchery and prostitution of the period, each party retorting on the other the charge of having introduced it, and styling it Morbo-Gallico or Mal de Naples, according to the nation to which they belonged. No class seems to have been exempt from it. Sextus della Rovere, nephew of Sextus IV., one of the wealthiest and most dissolute ecclesiastics of the age, was "rotten from his middle to the soles of his feet."[220] Even the haughty and majestic Julius II. would not expose his feet to the obeisance of the faithful, because they were discolored by the Morbus Gallicus:[221] Leo, his accomplished and munificent successor, was said to have owed his elevation to the fact that he was in such a depraved state of body as to render necessary a surgical operation in the Consistorium while the election was proceeding, the cardinals selecting the most sickly candidate for the papal tiara.[222] An unequivocal allusion to the pontiff's pursuits is found in an honorary inscription to Leo X. on his entrance into Florence, of which he was a native.

_Olim habuit Cypris sua tempora: tempora Mavos Olim habuit; nunc sua tempora Pallas habet: Mars fuit; est Pallas; Cypra semper erit._ Formerly Venus reigned supreme, then Mars, now Pallas: Mars was, Pallas now is, Venus shall always be.

Cardinals were not ashamed to contend openly for the favors of celebrated courtesans, and Charles VIII., when on his march to Naples, was provided by Ludovico Sforza and his wife Beatrice, his liberal entertainers, with the most beautiful women that could be procured.[223] Charles, indeed, is by some authors asserted to have been actually the first who introduced the venereal disease into Italy.

An eccentric trophy of public license is to be found in the poem of Fracastoro, a physician and accomplished writer--a really elegant production under the title of Syphilis. The argument of it is drawn from the sufferings of Syphilus, a shepherd who has been punished by Apollo with a malignant disease for impiety. In this work the author introduces the reader to the inner regions of the earth; to the mines, minerals, and attendant sprites, and explains the discovery of mercury, and its beneficent and healing influences on the invalid, who, once cured, is enjoined to pay his vows to Diana.

In 1520, that turbulent and reprobate artist Benvenuto Cellini, in his autobiography (one of the most spirited representations of national manners extant) gives an account of a syphilitic disease which he contracted from a courtesan. He says little of the mode of cure, but it is evident from the above that the use of mercury was known at a very early period after public attention was generally directed to the disorder.

The excesses of this iron age were not limited to ordinary licentiousness; crimes against nature seem to have been prevalent, and are even alleged to have been a source of revenue. In a collection of papal lives which has fallen under our notice, but which is not very particular in giving its authorities,[224] we find it stated that a memorial was presented to Sextus IV. by certain individuals of the family of the Cardinal of St. Lucia for an indulgence to commit sodomy, and that the Pope wrote at the bottom of it the usual "Fiat."

The case of Beatrice Cenci is better attested. Every one recollects the accumulated horrors of the story. The father, hating his children, his wife, all mankind, introduces prostitutes to his house, and debauches his daughter Beatrice by force. Through the instrumentality of a bishop she procures him to be murdered, and, with her step-mother, was executed for the crime, the Pope refusing to show any mercy. The Count Cenci had been addicted to unnatural offenses, and had thrice compounded with the papal government for his crimes by paying an enormous sum of money, and the narrator says that the acrimony of the Pope toward the wretched daughter was for having cut off a profitable source of revenue.

In Naples, the laws on the subject of prostitution were extremely severe. Previous to the thirteenth century, every procuress endeavoring to corrupt innocent females was punished, like an adulteress, by mutilation of her nose. The mother who prostituted her daughter suffered this punishment until King Frederick absolved such women as trafficked with their children from the pressure of want. The same prince, however, decreed against all who were found guilty of preparing drugs or inflammatory liquors to aid in their designs upon virtuous females, death in case of injuries resulting from their acts, and imprisonment when no serious harm was effected. These laws proved insufficient for their purpose, and toward the end of the fifteenth century profligacy ran riot in Naples. Ruffiani multiplied in its streets, procuring by force or corruption multitudes of victims to fill the taverns and brothels of the city. Penalties of extreme severity were proclaimed against them. The Ruffiani were ordered to quit the kingdom, and prostitutes were prohibited from harboring such persons among them. Any woman who disobeyed was condemned to be burned in the forehead with an iron, whipped in the most humiliating manner, and exiled.

Under King Roger a charge of seduction was never taken, but William, the successor of that prince, punished with death the crime of rape. The victim, however, was required to prove that she had shrieked aloud, and that she had preferred her complaint within eight days, or that she had been detained by force. When once a woman had prostituted herself, she had no right to refuse to yield her person to any one.

In Naples, prostitutes, in spite of the law passed to confine brothels to particular quarters, established themselves in the most beautiful streets of the city in palatial buildings, and there, with incessant clamor, congregated a horde of thieves, profligates, and vagabonds of every kind, until the chief quarter became uninhabitable. In 1577 they were ordered to quit the street of Catalana within eight days, under pain of the scourge for the women, the galleys for such of the proprietors as were commoners, while simple banishment was declared against the nobles.

One example of good legislation was the pragmatic law of 1470, to protect unfortunate women against the cupidity, the extortions, and the frauds of tavern-keepers and others. Men were in the habit of going into places of amusement with single girls, contracting a heavy debt, and then leaving their victims to pay. These were then given the choice of a disgraceful whipping or an engagement in the house. They often consented, and spent the remainder of their days in dependence on their creditors, without ability to liberate themselves. By the new law, masters of taverns were forbidden to give credit to prostitutes for more than a certain sum, and this only to supply them with food and clothing absolutely necessary. If they exceeded this amount they had no means of legal recovery.

The most remarkable feature in Neapolitan legislation on this subject was the establishment at an unknown, but early date, of the Court of Prostitutes. This tribunal, which sat at Naples, had its peculiar constitution, and had jurisdiction over all cases connected with prostitution, blasphemy, and some other infamous offenses. Toward the end of the sixteenth century it had risen to extraordinary power, and was prolific of abuses. It practiced all kinds of exaction and violence, every species of partiality and injustice, and even presumed to promulgate edicts of its own. The judges flung into prison numbers of young girls, whom they compelled to buy their liberty with money, and sometimes even dared to seize women who, though of lax conduct, could not be included in the professional class. This was discovered, and led to a reform of the court in 1589. Its powers were strictly defined, and its form of procedure placed under regulation, while the avenues to corruption were narrowed. The institution existed for nearly a hundred years after this.

In Rome, in the eleventh century, a brothel and a church stood side by side, and five hundred years after, under the pontificate of Paul II., prostitutes were numerous. Statutes were enacted, and many precautions taken, which prove the grossness of manners at that epoch. One convicted of selling a girl to infamy was heavily fined, and if he did not pay within ten days had one foot cut off. The nobility and common people alike indulged habitually in all kinds of excess. Tortures, floggings, brandings, banishment, were inflicted on some to terrify others, but with very incomplete success. To carry off and detain a prostitute against her will was punished by amputation of the right hand, imprisonment, flogging, or exile. The rich, however, invariably bought immunity for themselves.

Among the most extraordinary acts of legislation on this subject was the bull of Clement II., who desired to endow the Church with the surplus gains of the brothel. Every person guilty of prostitution was forced, when disposing of her property, either at death or during life, to assign half of it to a convent. This regulation was easily eluded, and proved utterly inefficacious. A tribunal was also established having jurisdiction over brothels, upon which a tax was laid, continuing in existence until the middle of the sixteenth century. Efforts were made to confine this class of dwellings to a particular quarter, but without success.

In some of the Italian states, as in Lombardy, men were forbidden to give prostitutes an asylum. They were prohibited from appearing among honest citizens, and were prevented from purchasing clothes or food, and from borrowing money by the hire of their persons.

After a time, however, a system of licensed brothels, in imitation of the institutions founded at Toulouse and Montpellier, was introduced into parts of Italy, and the brothels became very numerous. There was one at Mantua, and Venice was a very sink of prostitution. In 1421, the government enlisted women in this service to guard the virtue of the other classes. A matron was placed over them, who governed them, received their gains, and made a monthly division of profit. The names of several women, the most notorious and beautiful of the Venetian courtesans, are preserved by Nicolo Daglioni. A very small sum was paid them by their patrons.

The laws regulating prostitution and prostitutes seem to have had a wonderful similarity throughout Europe. Among other enactments were those regulating clothing, which were at one time promulgated in every state. Some of these were sumptuary, and merely prohibited the wearing of fashionable attire. Others directed particular costumes as a badge of the prostitute's calling, and to distinguish them in public from well-conducted women. At Mantua, prostitutes, when they appeared in the streets, were ordered to cover the rest of their clothes with a short white cloak, and wear a badge on their breast. At Bergamo the cloak was yellow; in Parma, white; in Milan, at first black woolen cloth, and then black silk. If disobedient, they might be fined; and in case of a second offense, whipped; and any one might strip off the garment of a girl illegally attired.

In the Duchy of Asola, in Piedmont, a regulation was established that a mother could disinherit her daughter for leading a vicious life, but she lost this privilege if it was proved that she had connived at her immorality. The father had equal authority, but with one curious limitation. When, says the law, a father has sought to marry his daughter, and has endowed her sufficiently, if she refuses to marry and becomes a prostitute, he may cut her off; but if he have opposed her marriage until she has reached the age of twenty-five, and she then become a libertine, he can not refuse to bequeath her his property; and the woman, on every opportunity to marry, is bound to present herself before her father and demand his consent. If he refused it, he was not allowed to punish her in cases where, at the age of thirty, she became a harlot.

The efforts to root out prostitution from houses and neighborhoods in Italy had, as elsewhere, the result of driving loose women to places of public resort. The baths were regularly frequented in every city in the Peninsula (hence the use of the word bagnio, as expressive of a disreputable place), so that there was scarcely a bath-keeper who was not also a brothel-keeper.

In Avignon, which, in consequence of the schism of the popes, may be considered a second Rome, a statute of the Church, in 1441, interdicted to the priests and clergy the use of certain baths, notorious as brothels. The license of prostitution was soon taken away in Avignon. The residence of the popes in that city had attracted a concourse of strangers from all parts of the globe, and brothels sprung up at the doors of the churches, and close to the papal residence and bishops' palaces. They brought so much scandal on the community that an edict was passed driving prostitutes out of the city.

In endeavoring to investigate the condition of prostitution in modern Italy, our inquiries and researches have been almost profitless, from the dearth of reliable statistical information as to any part of that most interesting country. In the fine arts, and in certain departments of abstract science, the republic of letters can show numerous records of Italy's state and progress. In all that tells of the people, their condition, their relations to each other, and their rulers, the statements of writers, both native and foreign, are so contradictory, so imbued with party passions and prejudices, or so flippantly careless and inaccurate, that we must peruse them with constant suspicion. At the same time, official documents are so sparingly given to the world that it is hopeless to fall back upon them.[225]

It is customary to think and speak of Italy, like Germany, as a whole. In reality, however, a wide difference prevails among the inhabitants of Piedmont, Tuscany, and Austrian Italy, the Papal States, and Naples. Rome, though not the political capital of Italy, must be considered the capital, in virtue of her papal court, her past traditions, and her large concourse of foreigners. But even her manners scarcely give the tone to the remainder of the country.

In Rome, prostitution is tolerated, though not legally permitted. There are no statistics from which the number of prostitutes can be calculated. At one time there were said to be five thousand of these unfortunates in the city; but this estimate is only another sample of the carelessness which is to be observed in writers on this subject. Under Paul IV. there were only fifty thousand inhabitants; forty years after they had increased to one hundred thousand. Public prostitutes are now as rarely seen in the streets of Rome as in those of other Italian cities. It is said, also, that there are scarcely any public brothels.[226] There is a law that a woman guilty of adultery shall be imprisoned for three months, but Italian usages are averse to legal proceedings; the scandal is offensive to society; besides, the courts require positive proof of the offense. With regard to seduction, the laws are equally stringent; but such cases, when brought to notice, are usually compromised by permission of the authorities, either by payment of a sum of money, or by marriage. Syphilis is always of considerable extent in Rome, and the venereal ward in San Jacomo is always full.[227] After the siege of Rome by the French in 1849, the disease was frightfully prevalent.

In 1798 there were thirty thousand poor, or about one fifth of the population of Rome, upon the lists of the curates of the several parishes. Under the administration of the French, up to 1814, the proportion had been diminished to one ninth. Since that period it has been on the increase.

There are in Rome nineteen hospitals for the treatment of the sick. In eight public hospitals the average number of patients daily is about fourteen hundred, who cost nineteen cents each per day. There are fourteen semi-convents where young girls are gratuitously received and educated, receiving a small dowry when they leave to marry or become nuns. The Hospital of St. Roch is for pregnant women.[228]

The Albergo dei Poveri at Naples is the finest poor-house in Italy. It accommodates upward of three thousand paupers of both sexes, and is provided with workshops and schools, so as to afford suitable employment and instruction. Notwithstanding this model establishment, and numerous others, whose annual revenues amount to nearly two millions and a half of dollars, Naples is infested with a large mendicant population in addition to the numbers accommodated in the poor-houses. The Lazaroni are a class peculiar to the place. Many of them utterly refuse to work, and prefer to subsist on the smallest coin of the kingdom which they can gain by begging. They bask in the sun all day, sleep on the ground or on the steps at night, and starve with the utmost complacency. An Epicurean might find in this abnegation of the cares of life a sound practical philosophy. That such a class is in the highest degree obnoxious to society must be apparent to every one. In the famous rising of Cardinal Ruffo, at the time of the French occupation in 1805, the Lazaroni perpetrated the most frightful excesses, and are said to have been relied on by the imbecile Bourbon government as their chief friends and supporters against the dangers of French Republicanism. Modern progress has drawn even Naples and the Lazaroni within its magic circle, and an accomplished traveler expresses doubts of their alleged unconquerable laziness, for he has seen them work, wear clothes, sleep at home, earn money when they had a chance, and conduct themselves very much like other people.[229] Perhaps, as with the Irish, a want of fair remuneration may be at the root of their idleness.

A singular institution of Italian society is the Cicisbeo, or Cavaliere Servente. This is a distant male relative, or friend, who invariably attends a married lady on all occasions of her appearance in public. He pays her all conceivable attentions, and performs even the most servile offices; carries her fan, her parasol, or her lapdog. We are not aware that any foreigner has been able to settle this anomaly of social life to his satisfaction. The Italians themselves sometimes maintain that there is no immorality or impropriety in the arrangement--that it is a matter of etiquette, in which the heart is in no way concerned. The husband is perfectly cognizant of it, and the appearance of the cicisbeo with the lady is more de regle than that of her husband. Originally, there can be very little question that the institution was of an amorous character, and the parties met privately at the Casini, where certain apartments were specially dedicated to the use of the ladies and their cavalieri.[230] With the French occupation of 1800 the custom became the subject of immoderate raillery and satire, and there is reason to believe it has been but partially revived.

In place, however, of the cicisbeo or cavaliere servente, whose services and attentions were a form of society, it is, we fear, undeniable that more intimate though less avowed relations exist between many Italian ladies and other men than their husbands. That there are numerous and admirable exceptions to the rule, if it be a rule, we freely admit; but, unless the concurrent testimony of all writers and travelers in Italy be absolutely false, and either basely slanderous or culpably careless, the marriage vow can only be regarded as a cloak for a license that is inadmissible to the unmarried woman.

The testimony of a profligate man is rarely to be taken against women; and though the witness be a lord and a poet, we do not know that this should make a difference were the case one of mere abuse. Coupled, however, as the inculpation is with extenuatory remarks, we think Lord Byron's observations valuable. In a letter to Mr. Murray, the celebrated London publisher (February 21, 1820), he says:

"You ask me for a volume of manners in Italy. Perhaps I am in the case to know more of them than most Englishmen. * * * * * I have lived in their houses, and in the heart of their families, sometimes merely as Amico di Casa, and sometimes as Amico di Cuore of the Dama, and in neither case do I feel justified in making a book of them. Their moral is not your moral; their life is not your life; you would not understand it; it is not English, nor French, nor German, which you would all understand. * * * * * I know not how to make you comprehend a people who are at once temperate and profligate, serious in their characters and buffoons in their amusements, capable of impressions and passions which are at once sudden and durable. * * * * * I should know something of the matter, having had a pretty general experience among their women, from the fisherman's wife up to the Nobil Dama whom I serve. * * * * * They are extremely tenacious, and jealous as furies, not permitting their lovers even to marry if they can help it, and keeping them always to them in public as in private. * * * * * The reason is, that they marry for their parents and love for themselves. They exact fidelity from a lover as a debt of honor, while they pay the husband as a tradesman. You hear a person's character, male or female, canvassed, not as depending on their conduct to their husbands or wives, but to their mistress or lover. If I wrote a quarto I don't know that I could do more than amplify what I have here noted. It is to be observed, that while they do all this, the greatest outward respect is to be paid to the husbands, not only by the ladies, but by their serventi, particularly if the husband serve no one himself (which is not often the case, however), so that you would often suppose them relations, the servente making the figure of one adopted in the family. Sometimes the ladies run a little restive, and elope, or divide, or make a scene, but this is at the starting, generally when they know no better, or when they fall in love with a foreigner, or some such anomaly, and is always reckoned unnecessary and extravagant."

As a counterpoise to these opinions of Lord Byron, it is but fair to give that of M. Valery, a traveler whose personal opportunities may have been less than in the case of the noble poet: "The morals of the Italian cities, which we still judge of from the commonplace reports of travelers of the last century, are now neither better nor worse than those of other capitals; perhaps at Naples they are even better."

The Countess Pepoli, a lady of patriotic and literary family, has written an able educational manual, in which she claims consideration for the number of "good and virtuous women" in Italy, whose existence is ignored by the prejudiced writers of extravagant diatribes. But we are afraid that the very exception, and the pains she takes to prove the temptations to which the married woman is exposed, only affirm the truth of the general charge.

Whatever allegations of veracious or exaggerated unchastity or immorality may be made against the Italians, they are generally to be laid at the door of the aristocracy and upper classes. Among the humbler Italians, the peasantry and the country poor, there is no ground for ascribing to them either greater idleness or worse morals than are to be found in other parts of Europe.

Foundling hospitals are to be met with in most great cities of Continental Europe. Among Protestants, a strong prejudice exists against these institutions. That they prevent infanticide is self-evident. Their operation as an encouragement of illicit intercourse can not be estimated without some minute inquiries into the illegitimacy of places which encourage them, and of others which are without them.

The proportion of children in the foundling hospitals of Italy is certainly large, but it is believed, on good grounds, that a considerable number of them are legitimate, and are abandoned by their parents on account of their poverty. Of the really illegitimate, there are no means of saying with accuracy (nor, as far as we know, have any attempts been made to do so) to what class of society the infants belong. Meanwhile, although there is no ground for assuming a larger proportion of illegitimate children than in northern climates, on the other hand, the publicly displayed prostitution of Italy is infinitely less.

Naples has a population of about four hundred thousand. Of fifteen thousand births there are two thousand foundlings; we can not say illegitimates, for, owing to the reasons already specified, there are no means of ascertaining the facts.

In Tuscany, in 1834, there were twelve thousand foundlings received into the various hospitals.

The Hospital of the Santo Spirito at Rome is a foundling asylum with a revenue of about fifty thousand dollars per annum.

About one in sixteen of these children is claimed by its parents; the majority are cared for, during infancy and childhood, either in the hospitals or with the neighboring peasantry, with whom they are boarded at a small stipend. When of sufficient age they are dismissed to work for themselves; but in many of the hospitals they have some claim in after-life on occasions of sickness or distress.

We have already alluded to the wide differences of national character in the various political divisions of Italy. The vices of laziness, mendicancy, and their kindred failings of licentiousness and unchastity are chiefly confined to the towns, large and small.[231] The peasantry of Naples and of the Papal States are industrious, temperate; and the peasant women, even those who, from the vicinity of Rome, frequent the studios of the artists as models, are generally of unexceptionable character.[232] The mountaineers of the Abruzzi, long infamous as banditti (a stigma affixed by the French or other dominant powers on those who resisted their rule), in harvest-time brave the deadly malaria of the Campagna to earn a few liri honestly for their starving children, although in so doing the many that never return to their mountain homes show the risks that all have run. The corn, wine, and oil raised in Italy, the well-supplied markets of Rome and other cities, are evidence that the peasantry do not all eat the bread of idleness. The Papal States contain some of the finest, richest, and best cultivated provinces in Italy.[233] It is in the towns we must look for the worst results of misgovernment and bad example.

XII. SPAIN

Resemblance between Spanish and Roman Laws on Prostitution.--Code of Alphonse IX.--Result of Draconian Legislation.--Ruffiani.--Court Morals.--Brothels.--Valencia.--Laws for the Regulation of Vice.-- Concubines legally recognized.--Syphilis.--Cortejo.--Reformatory Institutions at Barcelona.--Prostitution in Spain at the Present Day.--Madrid Foundling Hospital.

Between the ancient Spaniards and the Romans a most intimate connection subsisted from an early period of the Roman republic, and the laws and customs of the former bore the closest resemblance to those of the latter. This affinity continued so long as the Roman empire had a name, and after the establishment of Christianity as the state religion, the ties of kindred and dependence were drawn still closer, for the Spanish kingdom has ever been the favored heritage, and its rulers the most obedient sons of Rome. Thus the maxims of the Roman civil law were early incorporated into the political system, and they still remain the chief pillars of Spanish jurisprudence. Accordingly, we find, in their legislation on prostitution, that the Spaniards, together with the general theories, adopted the specific enactments of other Latin nations.

By the code of Alphonse IX., in the twelfth century, procurers were to be condemned to "civil death." Such offenders were thus classified:

1. Men who trafficked in debauchery; these were to be banished.

2. Keepers of houses of accommodation, who were to be fined, and their houses confiscated.

3. Brothel-keepers who hired out prostitutes, which prostitutes, if slaves, were to be manumitted; if free, were to be dowried at the cost of the offenders, so that they might have a chance of marriage.

4. Husbands conniving at the prostitution or dishonor of their wives: these were liable to capital punishment.

5. A class of persons styled Ruffiani (whence the modern word ruffian).

These latter were analogous to the pimp and bully of the present day, and, from the repeated and very severe laws against them, seem to have given great trouble to the authorities. They were banished, flogged, imprisoned; in short, got rid of on any terms. Girls who supported them were publicly whipped, and the general laws upon the matter were similar to those noted in the previous chapter on Italy.

In Spain, the profligacy of public morals attained a pitch beyond all precedent, possibly owing, in some measure, to Draconian legislation. Further laws were, from time to time, passed against the Ruffiani, as preceding edicts had fallen into desuetude, and their presence and traffic was encouraged by the prostitutes. These latter were forbidden to harbor the men, and on breach of this prohibition were to be branded, publicly whipped, and banished the kingdom. Procurers, procuresses, and adulteresses were punished by mutilation of the nose. Mothers who trafficked in their children's virtue, except under pressure of extreme want, were also liable to this barbarous punishment.

In 1552 and 1566, edicts were again passed against the Ruffiani. They were styled a highly objectionable class, dangerous to public order. On the first conviction as a ruffiano, the offender was sentenced to ten years at the galleys; for a second conviction, he received two hundred blows or stripes, and was sent to the galleys for life.

Up to this time the court of Spain seems to have been almost as strongly tinctured with licentiousness as those of other nations. About the middle of the fifteenth century, Henry IV. divorced his wife, Blanche of Aragon, after a union of twelve years, the marriage being publicly declared void by the Bishop of Segovia, whose sentence was confirmed by the Archbishop of Toledo, "por impotencia respectiva, owing to some malign influence." Henry subsequently espoused Joanna, sister of Alphonse V., King of Portugal. The bride was accompanied by a brilliant train of maidens, and her entrance into Castile was greeted by the festivities and military pageants which belonged to the age of chivalry. In her own country Joanna had been ardently beloved; in the land of her adoption her light and lively manners gave occasion to the grossest suspicions. Scandal named the Cavalier Beltran de la Cueva as her most favored lover. He was one of the handsomest men in the kingdom. At a tournament near Madrid he maintained the superior beauty of his mistress against all comers, and displayed so much prowess in the presence of the king as induced Henry to commemorate the event by the erection of a monastery dedicated to St. John.[234] It does not appear, however, whom Beltran de la Cueva indicated as the lady of his love on this occasion.

Two anecdotes may be mentioned as characteristic of the gallantry of the times. The Archbishop of Seville concluded a superb fête, given in honor of the royal nuptials, by introducing on the table two vases filled with rings garnished with precious stones, to be distributed among his female guests. At a ball given on another occasion, the young queen having condescended to dance with the French embassador, the latter made a solemn vow, in commemoration of so distinguished an honor, never to dance with any other woman.

While the queen's levity laid her open to suspicion, the licentiousness of her husband was undisguised. One of Joanna's maids of honor acquired an ascendency over Henry which he did not attempt to conceal, and after the exhibition of some disgraceful scenes, the palace became divided by the factions of the hostile fair ones. The Archbishop of Seville did not blush to espouse the cause of the paramour, who maintained a magnificence of state which rivaled royalty itself. The public were still more scandalized by Henry's sacrilegious intrusion of another of his mistresses into the post of abbess of a convent in Toledo, after the expulsion of her predecessor, a lady of noble rank and irreproachable character.

These examples of corruption influenced alike the people and the clergy. The middle class imitated their superiors, and indulged in an excess of luxury equally demoralizing and ruinous. The Archbishop of St. James was hunted from his see by the indignant populace in consequence of an outrage attempted on a youthful bride as she was returning from church after the performance of the nuptial ceremony.[235]

Under the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella a total change was effected. "They both exhibited a practical wisdom in their own personal relations which always commands respect, and which, however it may have savored of worldly policy in Ferdinand, was in his consort founded on the purest and most exalted principles. Under such a sovereign, the court, which had been little better than a brothel in the preceding reign, became the nursery of virtue and generous ambition. Isabella watched assiduously over the nurture of the high-born damsels of the court, whom she received into the royal palace, causing them to be educated under her own eye, and endowing them with liberal portions on their marriage."[236]

Joanna, the second daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, was unfortunate in her marriage to Philip, son of the Archduke Maximilian, and sovereign--in right of his mother--of the Low Countries. The couple embarked for Flanders in the year 1504, and soon after their arrival the inconstancy of the husband and the ungovernable sensibility of the wife occasioned some scandalous scenes. Philip was openly enamored of one of the ladies in her suite, and his injured wife, in a paroxysm of jealousy, personally assaulted her rival, and caused the beautiful locks which had excited the admiration of her fickle husband to be shorn from her head. This outrage so affected Philip that he vented his indignation against Joanna in the coarsest and most unmanly terms, and finally refused to have any farther intercourse with her.[237]

Public brothels were established in Spain, as in other countries of Europe, one of great extent being in existence in Valencia in the fifteenth century. It constituted a complete suburb in itself, similar to the Ghetto, or Jews' suburb of most capital cities. Indeed, from its description, it is doubtful if it was not a rogue's sanctuary, similar to the well known Alsatia in London. It was surrounded by a wall with one gate only, at which a warder was stationed. He was a public city officer, and one of his duties was to warn all comers of the risk their property ran in visiting such a place. If they wished to leave valuables in his care they could do so, and receive them on their exit. There were some hundreds of girls resident in this vast den of iniquity. To add to the disgrace of the locality, the place of public execution was at its gate.

In 1486, the rents, profits and emoluments of the public brothels of Seville were assigned to Alonzo Fajardo, the master of the royal table.

In 1559, there is an enactment in Granada fixing the rents to be paid by the women for their rooms and accommodation in public brothels, and also detailing the furniture and food with which they were to be provided in return. This is similar to the minute legislation of the German cities. This public provision having been made, no person was allowed to lend these women bed-linen.

The authorities of various cities might not permit a prostitute to reside in the town without previous examination by a duly licensed physician, who was to declare, upon oath, whether the woman then was or had recently been diseased.

By some of the Spanish laws, varraganas (kept mistresses or concubines) seem to have been a legal institution, for men of rank were forbidden to take slave-dancers, tavern-servants, procuresses, or prostitutes as concubines. This breach of the ordinary institutions of Christianity may probably have been a compromise of Moorish and Christian usages and morals. Before the final deadly struggle which ended in the expulsion of the Moors, intermarriages were not uncommon among the two peoples. Interchange of friendship and close intimacy existed between the races, and a mutual tolerance of each other's laws and customs was maintained, except by the enthusiasts of either religion.

The Spanish jurists distinctly recognized the woman's right to recover the wages of her infamy. The scholiasts struck out various fine distinctions, for which the monkish dialecticians were so deservedly ridiculed by the free-thinkers of the eighteenth century, and these were debated and discussed with the utmost eagerness.[238] One question was whether, if the man paid beforehand, and the woman refused to complete the contract, he could compel her? The weight of opinion seemed to be that, as he contemplated an immorality, he could neither recover the money nor enforce the agreement. Another equally important point was the use to which the gains of prostitution might be lawfully applied. The legality of their gains would seem to have overridden the mode of their expenditure, but casuists thought otherwise, and, by a royal edict of Alphonse IX., it was decided that priests could not receive funds obtained from such impure sources.

By the old Spanish law prostitutes were subjected to various disabilities in matters of inheritance or testamentary disposition. As mentioned in the review of the old German customs, the Church considered it a meritorious act to marry a harlot, on the assumption that thereby a brand was saved from the burning.[239] It is related of a young man that, while being led to the scaffold, a courtesan, struck by his manly beauty and bearing, offered to marry him, whereby, in virtue of a law or usage, his life would be saved. He rejected her proposition, as existence was not worth redemption at such a price. It is added that his life was nevertheless spared, in consideration of his spirit and courage.

In 1570, by order of Philip II., the regulations in force in the principal towns of Andalusia were extended to those of Castile. By these it was enacted that a woman became a prostitute of her own free will, and that no one could compel her to continue such, even though she had incurred debts. A surgeon was directed to pay her a weekly visit at her house, and report to the deputies of the Consistory those who were diseased, in order that they might be removed to hospital. The keeper of a brothel could not receive into his house any one who had not been previously examined, nor allow any one who was diseased to remain there, under a fine of a thousand maravedis, with thirty days' imprisonment. Each room was to contain certain furniture, and the house was to be closed on holidays, during Lent, Ember Week, and on all fast days, under a punishment of a hundred stripes to each woman who received visitors, as well as to the keeper of the house. These and other orders were to be hung upon different parts of the house, under a fine (about six dollars) and eight days' imprisonment.

The subject of venereal disease in Spain has acquired some interest from a generally received opinion that its appearance was made in that country, whence it was disseminated throughout Europe. Columbus and his crew were reported to have introduced it from America, but later investigations have proved that syphilis was not known on this side of the Atlantic until imported by Europeans. Facts have been advanced in preceding pages showing its almost simultaneous appearance in Italy and Spain, and we recur to the subject now merely with reference to the theory of its American origin. A late work, Lettere sulla Storia de Mali Venerei, di Domenice Thiene, Venezia, 1823, enumerates some proofs on the question. The main points are: 1. That neither Columbus nor his son allude, in any way, to such a disease in the New World. 2. Among frequent notices of the disease in the twenty-five years following the discovery of America, there is no mention of its originating there, but, on the contrary, a uniform derivation of it from some other source is assigned. 3. That the disorder was known and described before the siege of Naples, and therefore could not be introduced by the Spaniards at that time. 4. That it was known in a variety of countries in 1493 and the early part of 1494; a rapidity of diffusion irreconcilable with its importation by Columbus in 1493. 5. That the first work professing to trace its origin in America was not published till 1517, and was the production, not of a Spaniard, but a foreigner. The question of its origin is more definitely settled by a letter of Peter Martyr, noticing the symptoms in the most unequivocal manner, and dated April 5, 1488, about five years before the return of Columbus. Some doubts have been thrown upon the accuracy of this letter, but they do not invalidate it.[240]

In Madrid, in 1522, a special hospital for venereal patients was founded by Antoine Martin, of the order of St. Jean de Dieu. In 1575 the Spaniards passed an ordinance that no female domestics under forty years of age should be taken to service by unmarried men. The tenor of this law bespeaks the evil intended to be remedied.

In the present day, little is done in Spain in reference to prostitution by legislation on the subject. In his memoir on the subject to the Brussels Congress, Ramon de la Segra tells us that the old edicts have gradually become obsolete, and that neither the municipal authorities or general government take any farther interest in the question than an occasional enforcement of the catholic laws against immorality and women of ill fame. It is said that in Seville first-class houses of prostitution have a custom of retaining the services of a physician at their own expense, whose office is to attend and make examinations of the women. Cadiz is notorious for its attractive climate and its dissipations.[241]

In the last century a tone of manners prevailed in the Spanish peninsula which was materially changed by the French occupation sweeping away many of the laxities of the age. In 1780 the Italian system of an attendant upon married ladies was adopted in Spain. These were termed Cortejos, and it is stated that in the cities they were principally military men, but in the country the monks performed the duty. The fidelity and affection of the women were directed to their gallants, and it even was thought discreditable, without very sufficient reason, to be guilty of fickleness in this particular. Married men were even the cortejos of other men's wives, neglecting their own, or leaving them to follow the bent of their private inclinations. No husband was jealous, but it was etiquette for Spanish ladies to keep up an external decorum, and to abstain from marked attentions to a cortejo in the husband's presence, although he might be perfectly aware of his wife's infidelity, and of her lover's presence in the house.[242] A curious illustration of this extraordinary state of public manners is given in an incident that occurred in Carthagena. A gentleman one morning remarked to a friend, "Before I go to rest this night the whole city will be thrown into confusion." He occasioned this public disorder by going home an hour sooner than his usual time, whereby his wife's cortejo was compelled to beat a precipitate retreat. The cortejo's arrival at his own house produced a similar effect, which was multiplied through polite society all round the town.

By the Spanish laws, which were in many provinces especially favorable to women, they could make ex parte cases against their husbands of ill treatment, and if they had beaten them the punishment might be made very severe. These laws were, as may be supposed, the frequent means of flagrant injustice.

In Barcelona there was a Magdalen institution, having the double object of reforming prostitutes and of correcting women who failed in the marriage vow, or who neglected or disgraced their families. The former department was called the Casa de Galera; the latter, the Casa de Correccion. The prostitutes were partially supported at the public cost, their extra food, beyond bread and meat, being provided by their own labor, to which they were obliged to devote themselves all day. The lady culprits were supported by their relations. They were imprisoned by the sentence of a particular court, on the complaint of a member of their family, and they, as well as the prostitutes, were required to work. When deemed necessary, these offenders received personal correction. Drunkenness was one of the grounds of incarceration. The precise offenses are not mentioned by our author,[243] but the fashions and customs of nations are so distinct, that indiscretion, or even familiarity in one, might be immorality in another. A leading principle in Spanish manners is not to give offense. People may be as vicious as they please; it may be even notorious that they are so, but their manners must be outwardly correct. There is little doubt the violation of this maxim was the principal cause of imprisonment.

In Barcelona there was also, in 1780, a foundling hospital liberally supported. A curious custom was observed in reference to the girls. They were led in procession when of marriageable age, and any one who took a fancy to a young woman might ask her hand, indicating his choice by throwing a handkerchief on her in public.

In the Asturias certain forms of disease appeared with excessive virulence, and were very common. Syphilis was prevalent. There was a hospital at Oviedo for its cure, but patients had considerable reluctance to apply to it. Whether incident to this prevalence of syphilis or not, we have no means of ascertaining, but leprosy was very general, and there were twenty or more large houses for its cure in the Asturias. The common itch in a highly aggravated form was also general, and often productive of parasitical vermin.

The present state of Spanish society is the subject of the usual discrepancies between travelers, owing to their different prejudices, means of information, or opportunities of making observations. No country of Europe retains more of its original peculiarities and national habits than Spain. Under the fervid sun of Andalusia, the same rigorous observance of proprieties is hardly to be found as in the northern climate of Biscay, whose hardy sons have ever been the defenders of their rights and political privileges. Madrid, as the capital, might be thought a fair illustration of the habits and manners of the great bulk of the city populations, whose peculiarities of race have not been smoothed away by intercommunication, the traveling facilities of Spain being yet among the worst in Europe. The descendants of the Goth and the Moor are still distinct in character. A general prejudice exists as to the morality of Southern nations in Europe, and the Spanish women are by no means exempt from a full share of this unfortunate opinion. Nevertheless, a recent writer says:

"I speak my sincere opinion when I say that, with the exception of a few fashionable persons, whose lives do indeed seem to pass in one constant round of dissipations, whose time is spent in driving on the Prado, attending the theatre, the opera, or the ball-room, precisely as their compeers do in every other great city, the Spanish women are the most domestic in the world, the most devoted to the care of their children, the most truly pious, and the best ménagères. This latter circumstance may arise from the fact that their fortunes are rarely equal to their rank, and that a lavish expenditure would soon bring ruin upon the possessors of the most ancient names and most splendid palaces in Madrid."[244]

This opinion is confined solely to the higher classes of the city of Madrid. It expresses nothing as to the great bulk of the population, and, however gratifying the record of worth may be, we fear the eulogy must be taken cum grano salis.

Of the education of Spanish women, Mrs. Donn Piatt states that, by reason of the small fortunes of the nobility, the daughters of an ancient house must be made useful before they are accomplished; that the first consideration, however, is their religious education, to which, and to the preparation for confirmation--the great juvenile rite of Catholic countries--the utmost care and attention are devoted. Next after their religious tuition, the greatest pains are taken to make them accomplished housekeepers. They are taught to make their own clothes, to keep accounts, to regulate their expenditure, and to attend to the most minute details of the family economy. The advantages of a good solid education are not neglected; their natural capacity and innate taste for the arts, especially as musicians and painters, rapidly develop themselves, under very moderate tuition, to acquirements of a superior character, and the productions of young women of high station are spoken of with much admiration. One trait of Spanish character that speaks loudly in favor of the women is the devotion, respect, and obedience paid by sons to their mothers long after age has relieved them from maternal tutelage.

In Madrid there is a hospital for foundlings, which are said to amount to about four thousand annually. These are actual foundlings, exposed publicly to the compassion of the charitable. It is principally served by the Sisters of Charity. The infants are intrusted to nurses, and at the age of seven they are transferred to the Desamparados (unprotected) college, where they receive instruction in the simpler rudiments of education, and their religious and moral training is cared for. There is also an asylum to which others are drafted to learn some practical handicraft, such as glove-making, straw-hat making, embroidery, etc., and which seems, in a great measure, a self-supporting institution.

There are three Magdalen Hospitals: St. Nicholas de Barr, founded in 1691 for women of the better class, who are banished for misconduct from the homes of their husbands and fathers; that of the Arrepentidos, for penitents; and that of the Recogidos, founded in 1637, for the correction of women sent there by their families, in order that they may be induced to return to the paths of virtue.

XIII. PORTUGAL

Conventual Life in 1780.--Depravity of Women.--Laws against Adultery and Rape.--Venereal Disease.--Illegitimacy.--Foundling Hospitals of Lisbon and Oporto.--Singular Institutions for Wives.

A writer on Portugal, in the year 1780, complains of the scandalous licentiousness of the monks and nuns, of whom there were no less than two hundred and fifty thousand in a population of two millions. It is said that the convent Odivelas, the harem of the monarch John V., contained three hundred women, accounted the most beautiful and accomplished courtesans in the kingdom. The great Marquis de Pombal suppressed many of these convents, and was the general reformer of the religious orders.

Of the effect of such an example from such quarters on the population at that time, sunk, as they were, in the most imbecile ignorance, little need be said. The women of Portugal were reputed to surpass all European females in gallantry, and their attractions were such that only one interview was necessary to complete the conquest. To this condition of common immorality, the rigor of their husbands and male relations may have contributed not a little. They are said to have been outrageously jealous, and to have made no scruple of murdering any stranger who gave them even the weakest grounds of suspicion.

In the fundamental laws of Portugal, promulgated in 1143, it is enacted that, "if a married woman commit adultery, and the husband complain to the judge, and the judge is the king, the adulterer and adulteress shall be condemned to the flames; but if the husband retain the wife, neither party shall be punished."

In the case of a rape perpetrated on the person of a lady of rank, all the property of the ravisher went to the lady; and in case the female were not noble, the man, without regard to his rank, was obliged to marry her.

The writer whom we have already quoted[245] speaks of the venereal disease as being, at the time he wrote (1770-1780), habitual in Portugal, and that the Portuguese not knowing how to cure it, its malignity had become so intensified that, in some cases, individuals who had contracted a peculiar form of the malady had died in a few hours, as though struck down by an active and deadly poison. This is most probably the exaggeration of popular opinion on the subject. More recent writers are chary of information, and avoid the mention of matters so offensive to ears polite.

The manners and morals of the higher ranks of society must have undergone a material change for the better in the present century, for an English nobleman (Lord Porchester, since Earl of Caernarvon) speaks in very favorable terms of the propriety, amiability, and excellence of the Portuguese ladies, which, excepting in the matter of intellectual education, left them in no wise behind the worthy of their sex in other countries of Europe.

Among the lower classes, however, it would not seem that the tone of morals had been very much amended, whether we consider their regard for female virtue, or their cultivation of the maternal tenderness and solicitude natural to all created beings.

In the neighborhood of Oporto, country women may be met conveying little babies to the Foundling Hospital, four or five together, in a basket. These helpless creatures are the illegitimate children of peasant girls, openly deserted in the villages, and thus forwarded by the authorities to the care of those pious strangers who undertake their nurture and preservation.[246]

In these cases, says Mr. Kingston, the females are not treated by their parents with any harshness or rigor. They are rather compassionated for their misfortune, and are only sent away from home when found obstinately persistent in a course of evil.

As may be supposed, the foundling hospitals have abundant claims on their funds. The Real Casapia, at Belem, near Lisbon, and another hospital in Lisbon attached to the Casa de Misericordia, receive together nearly three thousand children, who are brought up to different callings, and otherwise prepared for active life, as is usual in such institutions. There is a similar asylum, equally frequented, in Oporto. In this city there is also an asylum in which husbands may place their wives during their own absence from home. It often happens that ladies, on such occasions, enter the asylum of their own accord.

There is also in Oporto an establishment in the nature of a Penitentiary, in which husbands may immure their faithless wives, or even those who give grounds of suspicion. It is presumed that in the nineteenth century, even in Portugal, this must be done under color of some legal authority.