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Updated: May 18, 2025
Although custom will never reconcile us to the conduct of a Nero or a Claudius, it will heighten or blunt the delicacy of our sentiments on right and wrong. The fashion of the times of Charles II. made dissoluteness reputable, and discountenanced regularity of conduct. There is a customary behaviour that we expect in the old and in the young, in the clergyman and in the military man.
In these hot damp climates the venereal requirements and reproductive powers of the female greatly exceed those of the male; and hence the dissoluteness of morals would be phenomenal, were it not obviated by seclusion, the sabre and the revolver. This may, perhaps, partly account for their mildness and effeminacy; for: C'est la constipation qui rend l'homme rigoureux.
What mattered the debauchery, the perversion arising from excess of wealth and power, the luxuriousness and dissoluteness of life, since it seemed a proven fact that the capitals that had been queens of the world had never reigned without extreme civilisation, a cult of beauty and of pleasure!
His children were tainted with the dissoluteness of their father, and marriage had not repaired the reputation of his daughters, or cured them of depravity: this was the man whom I now proposed to visit. I scarcely need to say that the calumny of Betty Lawrence gave me no uneasiness. My father had no doubt been deceived, as well as my father's neighbours, by the artifices of this woman.
As long as the household went along as usual, there was nothing to complain about. Then, after all, she could not be doing anything to make Coupeau stop drinking; matters were arranged so easily to the general satisfaction. One is generally punished if one does what is not right. His dissoluteness had gradually become a habit. Now it was as regular an affair as eating and drinking.
when, amidst a great dissoluteness of manners, alike common to Church and laity, the opposite virtues were, as is invariable in such epochs of society, carried by the few purer natures into heroic extremes. "And as gold, the adorner of the world, springs from the sordid bosom of earth, so chastity, the image of gold, rose bright and unsullied from the clay of human desire."
Had we no precise and personal information about him in this respect, still his literary work, Gargantua and Pantagruel, would not leave us in any doubt: there is no printed book, sketch, conversation, or story, which is more coarse and cynical, and which testifies, whether as regards the author or the public for whom the work is intended, to a more complete and habitual dissoluteness in thought, morals, and language.
He draws us to him with sympathy. He sounds the same mournful note which we detect in Thucydides. Tacitus deplores the folly and dissoluteness of the rulers of his nation; he bewails the misfortunes of his country. The merits we ascribe to Thucydides, diligence, accuracy, love of truth, impartiality, are his. The desire to quote from Tacitus is irresistible.
"A still further obstacle to the effectual conversion of the Negroes has been the almost unrestrained licentiousness of their manner, the habits of vice and dissoluteness in which they are permitted to live, and the sad examples they too frequently see in their managers and overseers.
Multitudes of men who are kept within bounds would say, "Go to, now! Let me get all out of this life there is in it. Come, gluttony, and inebriation, and uncleanness, and revenge, and all sensualities, and wait upon me! My life may be somewhat shortened in this world by dissoluteness, but that will only make heavenly indulgence on a larger scale the sooner possible.
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