I was horrified – I suffered, prayed, and succumbed. I was already corrupted, both in my imagination and in reality, but I had still not taken the final step. In my lonely way I was going from bad to worse, but so far I had not laid my hands on any other human being. But then one of my brother’s friends, a student, a bon vivant, one of those so-called “jolly good chaps” (an out-and-out villain, in other words), who had taught us to play cards and drink vodka, persuaded us to go with him to a certain place after a drinking-bout one evening. My brother was still a virgin, like myself, and he fell that very same night. And I, a fifteen-year-old boy, defiled myself and contributed to the defilement of a woman without the slightest understanding of what I was doing. After all, never once had I heard any of my elders say that what I was doing was wrong. And it’s not something you hear said nowadays, either. It’s true that it’s in the Ten Commandments, but you know as well as I do that they’re only useful for giving the school chaplain the right answers on examination day, and even then they’re not a great deal of help – much less so, for example, than knowing when to use ut in conditional clauses.

‘That’s the way it was: none of the older people whose opinions I respected ever told me that what I was doing was wrong. On the contrary, the people I looked up to told me it was the right thing to do. I was told that, after I had done it, my struggles and sufferings would ease. I was told this, and I read it. My elders assured me that it would be good for my health. As for my companions, they said it entailed a kind of merit, a certain bravado. Accordingly, I could see nothing but good in it. The danger of infection? But that, too, is taken care of. Our solicitous government takes pains to see to it. It supervises the orderly running of the licensed brothels and ensures the depravation of grammar-school boys. Even our doctors keep an eye on this problem, for a fee of course. That is only proper. They assert that debauchery is good for the health, for it’s they who have instituted this form of tidy, legalized debauchery. I even know mothers who take an active concern for this aspect of their son’s health. And science directs them to the brothels.’

‘Why science?’ I asked.

‘What are doctors, if not the high priests of science? Who are the people responsible for depraving young lads, claiming it’s essential for their health? They are. And having made such a claim, they proceed to apply their cures for syphilis with an air of the utmost gravity.’

‘But why shouldn’t they cure syphilis?’

‘Because if even one per cent of the effort that is put into curing syphilis were to be employed in the eradication of debauchery, syphilis would long ago have disappeared from memory. But our efforts are employed not in eradicating debauchery, but in encouraging it, making it safe. Anyway that isn’t the point. The point is that I, like nine out of ten, if not more, young men, not only in our own class but in all the others as well, even the peasantry, have had the horrible experience of falling without succumbing to the natural temptation of the charms of any one woman in particular. No, it wasn’t a case of my being seduced by a woman. I fell because the society I lived in regarded what was a fall either as a bodily function that was both legitimate and necessary for the sake of health, or as a diversion that was thoroughly natural for a young man and was not only pardonable, but even innocent. I myself didn’t know it was a fall; I simply began to indulge in something that was half pleasure and half physical necessity – both, I was assured, perfectly proper for young men of a certain age.