I knew an aged woman who had once been "gay," whose only link with the past was a daughter almost as beautiful as she herself had been.

This poor creature to whom her mother had never said, "You are my child," except to bid her nourish her old age as she herself had nourished her youth, was called Louise, and, being obedient to her mother, she abandoned herself without volition, without passion, without pleasure, as she would have worked at any other profession that might have been taught her.
The constant sight of dissipation, precocious dissipation, in addition to her constant sickly state, had extinguished in her mind all the knowledge of good and evil that God had perhaps given her, but that no one had ever thought of developing.

I shall always remember her, as she passed along the boulevards almost every day at the same hour, accompanied by her mother as assiduously as a real mother might have accompanied her daughter.

I was very young then, and ready to accept for myself the easy morality of the age.

I remember, however, the contempt and disgust which awoke in me at the sight of this scandalous chaperoning.