459. (13) In men who are not yet able for various reasons to enter into marriage, and because of their salaciousness cannot control their lusts, this conjugial ideal may be preserved if their love for the opposite sex becomes restricted to a single courtesan. Reason sees and experience attests that men who are salacious cannot contain their excessive and inordinate lusts. Therefore, in order for this excessive and inordinate drive to be restrained and reduced to something more moderate and temperate in men who struggle with sexual heat and who for a number of reasons cannot hasten or anticipate the time of their marriage, the only apparent recourse and refuge, so to speak, seems to be their resorting to a courtesan, which in French is called a ma-tresse. People know that in countries where there are governmental services, marriages cannot be contracted by many until past early manhood, because positions must first be earned and the means acquired for supporting a home and family before they can for the first time seek a suitable wife. And yet the wellspring of virility in the preceding age can with few be kept closed up and reserved for a wife. It is preferable, indeed, that it be reserved. But if, owing to an uncontrollable intensity of lust, it cannot be, an intermediary course is required to prevent conjugial love from in the meantime perishing. In support of its being to resort to a courtesan are the following arguments:
1. By this means excessive and promiscuous fornications are curbed and limited, and the person thus introduced into a more restricted state, more akin to married life. [2] 2. Sexual desire - boiling at first and as though consuming with fire - is calmed and softened, and thus the lasciviousness of salaciousness, in itself foul, is tempered by something analogous to marriage. [3] 3. By resorting to a courtesan the virile forces are not cast away and imbecilities contracted, as they are by indiscriminate and unrestricted indulgences of sexual lust. [4] 4. By it physical diseases and mental insanities are also avoided. [5] 5. By it adulteries are likewise guarded against, which are illicit affairs with married women, and also debaucheries, which are violations of virgins; not to mention criminal acts too villainous to name. For when a boy first reaches adolescence, he thinks of adulteries and debaucheries as being no more than acts of fornication, thus that one is no different from another. Nor does he know in accordance with reason how to resist the enticements of some of the sex, who have carefully cultivated the art of harlotry. But in resorting to a courtesan, which is a more temperate and rational form of fornication, he can learn and see the distinctions. [6] 6. By resorting to a courtesan one is kept away from four kinds of lusts which are destructive of conjugial love in the highest degree, namely, a lust to deflower, a lust for variety, a lust to rape, and a lust to seduce states of innocence (which we will take up in considerations later on*). None of this has been said, however, for those who can contain the heat of their lust; nor for those who are able to enter marriage as soon as they mature so as to offer and extend the first fruits of their manhood to their wife. * See the chapters on these subjects, nos. 501ff, 506ff, 511f, 513f.
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