I enjoy writing up under assumed names the follies I have seen you commit. Your follies make me laugh and my writings annoy you. To speak to you frankly, Reader, I find that you are the more wicked of the two of us. How satisfied would I be if it were as easy for me to protect myself from your calumny as it is for you to protect yourself from the boredom or the danger of my work!
Filthy hypocrites. Leave me in peace. Fuck away like unsaddled asses but allow me to say 'fuck'. I allow you the action. Allow me the word. You boldly use words like 'kill', 'steal', 'betray', all the time but only dare to pronounce that word under your breath. Might it be that the less you allow such supposed impurities to pass your lips the more they remain in your thoughts? And what has a thing so natural, so right and so necessary as sexual intercourse done to you that you should exclude the word for it from your conversation and imagine that your mouth, your eyes and your ears will be sullied by it?
It is a good thing that the expressions we use least, write least, and repress most are the best known and the most widely understood. Thus the proper term is as common as the word 'bread'. It is present in every age in every idiom. There are a thousand synonyms in all languages and it impresses itself in each of us without being expressed, without voice and without shape, and the sex which does the thing the most is the one which says the word the least.
I can still hear you exclaiming: 'Oh! What a vulgar man! Oh! What a cynic! Oh! What a sophist!'
Go on. Heap your insults on an estimable author who is always in your hands and whom I only translate here. To me the freedom of his style is almost the guarantee of the purity of his morals. It is Montaigne. Lasciva est nobis pagina vita proba (Our page is licentious, but our life pure).
