Note 42 — IV.—MALE PROSTITUTION, AND PARTICULARLY THAT OF THE STUDENT, THE OFFICIAL, AND THE SOLDIER.

Saint Simon, endeavouring to have an illicit intimacy of the Duke of Orleans broken off, showed him the opinion existing against him. “There is,” said he, “a general estrangement, which has the complexion of rage, because no one can endure in a grandson of France, at the age of 35, an outrage upon good morals which the magistrate and the police would long ago have punished in any one who might not have been high enough in rank to be shielded from censure.” He puts before him the distinction and honours that attach to the moral men from amongst whom Louis XIV has chosen his generals and advisers, whilst noblemen of high birth are deprived of the distinctions of their class, debased in their profligate habits, unknown or despised at court, left to their own shame and to wretchedness, expelled from the meanest societies, objects of the public blame and contempt, and reduced to find themselves too despicable for the blows people disdain to inflict upon them. Elsewhere, St. Simon further caused the reception of Villars by the parliament to be looked upon as an enormity, because, he said, “against the most common practice, no peer was taken as a witness of his life and manners, which will afford cause for public dissertation; had he so acted from respect or from shame, or from a fear of being rejected? I was pained,” he adds, “to find myself at so humiliating a ceremonial.”