take from them, by honouring them with your familiarity, that mark of disgrace and infamy with which they had been stigmatized by the laws of the church and of the state, and which degraded them in the eyes of men.
Thus it is through you that the people participate in these debaucheries; that this poison infects the cities and provinces; that these public pleasures become the source of the public miseries and licentiousness; that so many unfortunate victims renounce their modesty to gratify your pleasures, and, seeking to improve the mediocrity of their fortune by the exercise of talents which your passions alone have rendered useful and recommendable, come upon criminal theatres to express passions for the gratification of yours; to perish in order to please; to sacrifice their innocence, in occasioning the loss of it to those who listen to them; to become public rocks, and the scandal of religion; to bring misery and dissension even into your families, and to punish you, woman of the world, for the support and credit which you give them by your presence and your applauses, by becoming the criminal object of the passion and of the ill-conduct of your children, and perhaps dividing with yourself the heart of your husband, and completely ruining his affairs and fortune.
Fifthly. A scandal of duration. It is little, my brethren, that the corruption of our age is almost wholly the work of the great and powerful; the ages to come will likewise be indebted to you, perhaps, for a part of their licentiousness and excesses. Those profane poems, which have seen the light solely through your means, shall still corrupt hearts in the following ages: those dangerous authors, whom you honour with your protection, shall pass into the hands of your posterity; and your crimes shall be multiplied with that dangerous venom which they contain, and which shall be communicated from age to age. Even your passions, immortalized in history, after having been a scandal in their time, will also become one in the following ages: the reading of your errors, preserved to posterity, shall raise up imitators after your death: instructions in guilt will be sought for in the narrative of your adventures; and your excesses shall not expire with you. The voluptuousness of Solomon still furnishes blasphemies and derisions to the impious, and motives of confidence to libertinism; the infamous passion of Potiphar's wife hath been preserved down to us, and her rank hath immortalized her weakness. Such is the destiny of the vices and of the passions of the great and powerful: they do not live for their own age alone; they live for the ages to come, and the duration of their scandal hath no other limits than that of their name.
You know this to be a truth, my brethren. Do they not, at present, continue to read, with new danger, those scandalous memoirs composed in the age of our fathers, which have transmitted down to us the excesses of the preceding courts, and immortalized the passions of the principal persons who figured in them? The irregularities of an obscure people, and of the rest of men who then
