By: DAVID RICE
Re: Voltaire, Adultry

Adultery

                NOTE ON A MAGISTRATE WRITTEN ABOUT 1764

A Senior magistrate of a French town had the misfortune to have a
wife who was debauched by a priest before her marriage, and who
since covered herself with disgrace by public scandals: he was so
moderate as to leave her without noise. This man, about forty years
old, vigorous and of agreeable appearance, needs a woman; he is too
scrupulous to seek to seduce another man's wife, he fears
intercourse with a public woman or with a widow who would serve him
as concubine. In this disquieting and sad state, he addresses to his
Church a plea of which the following is a precis:

My wife is criminal, and it is I who am punished. Another woman is
necessary as a comfort to my life, to my virtue even; and the sect
of which I am a member refuses her to me; it forbids me to marry an
honest girl. The civil laws of to-day, unfortunately founded on
canon law, deprive me of the rights of humanity. The Church reduces
me to seeking either the pleasures it reproves, or the shameful
compensations it condemns; it tries to force me to be criminal.

I cast my eyes over all the peoples of the earth; there is not a
single one except the Roman Catholic people among whom divorce and a
new marriage are not natural rights.

What upheaval of the rule has therefore made among the Catholics a
virtue of undergoing adultery, and a duty of lacking a wife when one
has been infamously outraged by one's own?

Why is a bond that has rotted indissoluble in Spite of the great law
adopted by the code, quidquid ligatur dissolubile est? I am allowed
a separation a mensa et thoro, and I am not allowed divorce. The law
can deprive me of my wife, and it leaves me a name called
"sacrament"! What a contradiction! what slavery! and under what laws
did we receive birth!

What is still more strange is that this law of my Church is directly
contrary to the words which this Church itself believes to have been
uttered by Jesus Christ: "Whosoever shall put away his wife, except
it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery"
(Matt. xix. 9).

I do not examine whether the pontiffs of Rome are in the right to
violate at their pleasure the law of him they regard as their
master; whether when a state has need of an heir, it is permissible
to repudiate her who can give it one. I do not inquire if a
turbulent woman, demented, homicidal, a poisoner, should not be
repudiated equally with an adulteress: I limit myself to the sad
state which concerns me: God permits me to remarry, and the Bishop
of Rome does not permit me.

Divorce was a practice among Catholics under all the emperors; it
was also in all the dismembered states of the Roman Empire. The
kings of France, those called "of the first line," almost all
repudiated their wives in order to take new ones. At last came
Gregory IX., enemy of the emperors and kings, who by a decree made
marriage an unshakeable yoke; his decretal became the law of Europe.
When the kings wanted to repudiate a wife who was an adulteress
according to Jesus Christ's law, they could not succeed; it was
necessary to find ridiculous pretexts. Louis the younger was
obliged, to accomplish his unfortunate divorce from Eleanor of
Guienne, to allege a relationship which did not exist. Henry IV., to
repudiate Marguerite de Valois, pretexted a still more false cause,
a refusal of consent. One had to lie to obtain a divorce
legitimately.

What! a king can abdicate his crown, and without the Pope's
permission he cannot abdicate his wife! Is it possible that
otherwise enlightened men have wallowed so long in this absurd
servitude!

That our priests, that our monks renounce wives, to that I consent;
it is an outrage against population, it is a misfortune for them,
but they merit this misfortune which they have made for themselves.
They have been the victims of the popes who wanted to have in them
slaves, soldiers without families and without fatherland, living
solely for the Church: but I, magistrate, who serve the state all
day, I need a wife in the evening; and the Church has not the right
to deprive me of a benefit which God accords me. The apostles were
married, Joseph was married, and I want to be. If I, Alsacian, am
dependent on a priest who dwells at Rome, if this priest has the
barbarous power to rob me of a wife, let him make a eunuch of me for
the singing of Misereres in his chapel.

                             NOTE FOR WOMEN

Equity demands that, having recorded this note in favour of
husbands, we should also put before the public the case in favour of
wives, presented to the junta of Portugal by a Countess of Arcira.
This is the substance of it:

The Gospel has forbidden adultery for my husband just as for me; he
will be damned as I shall, nothing is better established. When he
committed twenty infidelities, when he gave my necklace to one of my
rivals, and my ear-rings to another, I did not ask the judges to
have him shaved, to shut him up among monks and to give me his
property. And I, for having imitated him once, for having done with
the most handsome young man in Lisbon what he did every day with
impunity with the most idiotic strumpets of the court and the town,
have to answer at the bar before licentiates each of whom would be
at my feet if we were alone together in my closet; have to endure at
the court the usher cutting off my hair which is the most beautiful
in the world; and being shut up among nuns who have no common sense,
deprived of my dowry and my marriage covenants, with all my property
given to my coxcomb of a husband to help him seduce other women and
to commit fresh adulteries.

I ask if it is just, and if it is not evident that the laws were
made by cuckolds?

In answer to my plea I am told that I should be happy not to be
stoned at the city gate by the canons, the priests of the parish and
the whole populace. This was the practice among the first nation of
the earth, the chosen nation, the cherished nation, the only one
which was right when all the others were wrong.

To these barbarities I reply that when the poor adulteress was
presented by her accusers to the Master of the old and new law, He
did not have her stoned; that on the contrary He reproached them
with their injustice, that he laughed at them by writing on the
ground with his finger, that he quoted the old Hebraic proverb-"He
that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her";
that then they all retired, the oldest fleeing first, because the
older they were the more adulteries had they committed.

The doctors of canon law answer me that this history of the
adulteress is related only in the Gospel of St. John, that it was
not inserted there until later. Leontius, Maldonat, affirm that it
is not to be found in a single ancient Greek copy; that none of the
twenty-three early commentators mentions it. Origen, St. Jerome, St.
John Chrysostom, Theophilact, Nonnus, do not recognize it at all. It
is not to be found in the Syriac Bible, it is not in Ulphilas'
version.

That is what my husband's advocates say, they who would have me not
only shaved, but also stoned.

But the advocates who pleaded for me say that Ammonius, author of
the third century, recognized this story as true, and that if St.
Jerome rejects it in some places, he adopts it in others; that, in a
word, it is authentic to-day. I leave there, and I say to my
husband: "If you are without sin, shave me, imprison me, take my
property; but if you have committed more sins than I have, it is for
me to shave you, to have you imprisoned, and to seize your fortune.
In justice these things should be equal."

My husband answers that he is my superior and my chief, that he is
more than an inch taller, that he is shaggy as a bear; that
consequently I owe him everything, and that he owes me nothing.

But I ask if Queen Anne of England is not her husband's chief? if
her husband the Prince of Denmark, who is her High Admiral, does not
owe her entire obedience? and if she would not have him condemned by
the court of peers if the little man's infidelity were in question?
It is therefore clear that if the women do not have the men
punished, it is when they are not the stronger.


... Pious ignorance always regards intelligence as a kind of blasphemy.
* Shy.David@EdenBBS.com
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 * Origin: "She blinded me with science!" (1:124/9005)