“The children came rapidly, one after another, and there happened what happens in our society with children and doctors. Yes, children, maternal¹ love, it is a painful thing. Children, to a woman of our society, are not a joy, a pride, nor a fulfilment of her vocation², but a cause of fear, anxiety, and interminable suffering, torture. Women say it, they think it, and they feel it too. Children to them are really a torture, not because they do not wish to give birth to them, nurse them, and care for them (women with a strong maternal instinct — and such was my wife — are ready to do that), but because the children may fall sick and die. They do not wish to give birth to them, and then not love them; and when they love, they do not wish to feel fear for the child’s health and life. That is why they do not wish to nurse them. ‘If I nurse it,’ they say, ‘I shall become too fond of it.’ One would think that they preferred india-rubber children, which could neither be sick nor die, and could always be repaired. What an entanglement³ in the brains of these poor women! Why such abominations to avoid pregnancy⁴, and to avoid the love of the little ones?

“Love, the most joyous⁵ condition of the soul, is represented as a danger. And why? Because, when a man does not live as a man, he is worse than a beast. A woman cannot look upon a child otherwise than as a pleasure. It is true that it is painful to give birth to it, but what little hands! . . . Oh, the little hands! Oh, the little feet! Oh, its smile! Oh, its little body! Oh, its prattle⁶! Oh, its hiccough! In a word, it is a feeling of animal, sensual maternity⁷. But as for any idea as to the mysterious significance of the appearance of a new human being to replace us, there is scarcely a sign of it.

“Nothing of it appears in all that is said and done. No one has any faith now in a baptism of the child, and yet that was nothing but a

分享到：