BallofTallow Author:Guy de Maupassant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE THIEF WHILE apparently thinking of something else, Doctor Sorbier had been listening quietly to those amazing accounts of burglaries and daring deeds that... more » might have been taken from the trial of Cartouche. " Assuredly," he exclaimed, " assuredly, I know of no viler fault nor any meaner action than to attack a girl's innocence, to corrupt her, to profit by a moment of unconscious weakness and of madness, when her heart is beating like that of a frightened fawn, and her pure lips seek those of her tempter; when she abandons herself without thinking of the irremediable stain, nor of her fall, nor of the morrow. " The man who has brought this about slowly, viciously, who can tell with what science of evil, and who, in such a case, has not steadiness and self- restraint enough to quench that flame by some icy words, who has not sense enough for two, who cannot recover his self-possession and master the runaway brute within him, and who loses his head on the edge of the precipice over which she is going to fall, is as contemptible as any man who breaks open a lock, or as any rascal on the lookout for a house left defenseless and unprotected or for some easyand dishonest stroke of business, or as that thief whose various exploits you have just related to us. " I, for my part, utterly refuse to absolve him, even when extenuating circumstances plead in his favour, even when he is carrying on a dangerous flirtation, in which a man tries in vain to keep his balance, not to exceed the limits of the game, any more than at lawn tennis; even when the parts are inverted and a man's adversary is some precocious, curious, seductive girl, who shows you immediately that she has nothing to learn and nothing to experience, except the last chapter of love, one of those girls from whom may f...« less