Never have I found a more perfect description of that which I have termed criminal, epileptoid vertigo. But here again is a mistake of fact arising from a velleity not content with knowledge. It is that the novelist several times explains these bloodthirsty sexual instincts by a peculiar kind of atavism: the tendency, namely, to avenge the evil that women had done to his race; the spite accumulated from male to male since the first deceit in the depths of caverns. This is an error of fact. Primitive women have never done wrong to men. More feeble than men, they have always been their victims. These bloodthirsty sexual instincts are explained by a quite different atavism, which goes back to inferior animals, to the conflict between the males for the conquest of the female, who remained for the strongest; and by the blows that were inflicted on the woman in order to reduce her to conjugal slavery, conflicts of which traces still remain in Roman history (the Rape of the Sabines), and in the nuptial rites of almost all European countries, and in those of New Zealand, where the husband knocks down his wife before carrying her off to the matrimonial bed.
Another technical defect is, that a man who has arrived at the degree of degeneracy that Jacques has, ought to have still other vices: as great violence of character, impulsiveness without cause, profound immorality; while, as a matter of fact, except in moments of sexual fury, he appears as a good and honorable man. However, even recognising the force of his bloody sexual monomania, I find that instinctive aversion, characteristic of the good man, to be proper which Jacques feels at the thought of killing some one who is not a young and beautiful woman; for instance, to killing his rival, notwithstanding the favorable circumstances and the suggestions of Séverine.
"To kill that man, my God! Had he the right to do it? When a fly troubled him he would crush it with a blow. One day when a cat had got between his legs, he had broken its back with a kick. But to kill this man, his fellow-creature! He must reason with himself, he must prove his right to murder; the right of the strong whom the weak are troublesome to.... But afterwards that appeared to him monstrous, impracticable, impossible. The civilised man revolted in him, the acquired force of education, the slow and indestructible concretion of inherited ideas. His cultivated brain, filled with scruples, repelled murder with horror, as soon as he began to reason about it. Yes, to kill in a case of necessity, in a transport of rage! But to kill voluntarily by design, and from interest, no never, never could he do it!"