This passage from Camille was shared with me by Rachael Benedict and I loved it so much I feel I should share with you!

“To be loved by a pure young girl, to be the first to reveal to her the
strange mystery of love, is indeed a great happiness, but it is the
simplest thing in the world. To take captive a heart which has had no
experience of attack, is to enter an unfortified and ungarrisoned
city. Education, family feeling, the sense of duty, the family, are
strong sentinels, but there are no sentinels so vigilant as not to be
deceived by a girl of sixteen to whom nature, by the voice of the man
she loves, gives the first counsels of love, all the more ardent
because they seem so pure.

The more a girl believes in goodness, the more easily will she give
way, if not to her lover, at least to love, for being without mistrust
she is without force, and to win her love is a triumph that can be
gained by any young man of five-and-twenty. See how young girls are
watched and guarded! The walls of convents are not high enough,
mothers have no locks strong enough, religion has no duties constant
enough, to shut these charming birds in their cages, cages not even
strewn with flowers. Then how surely must they desire the world which
is hidden from them, how surely must they find it tempting, how surely
must they listen to the first voice which comes to tell its secrets
through their bars, and bless the hand which is the first to raise a
corner of the mysterious veil!

But to be really loved by a courtesan: that is a victory of infinitely
greater difficulty. With them the body has worn out the soul, the
senses have burned up the heart, dissipation has blunted the feelings.
They have long known the words that we say to them, the means we use;
they have sold the love that they inspire. They love by profession,
and not by instinct. They are guarded better by their calculations
than a virgin by her mother and her convent; and they have invented
the word caprice for that unbartered love which they allow themselves
from time to time, for a rest, for an excuse, for a consolation, like
usurers, who cheat a thousand, and think they have bought their own
redemption by once lending a sovereign to a poor devil who is dying of
hunger without asking for interest or a receipt.

Then, when God allows love to a courtesan, that love, which at first
seems like a pardon, becomes for her almost without penitence. When a
creature who has all her past to reproach herself with is taken all at
once by a profound, sincere, irresistible love, of which she had never
felt herself capable; when she has confessed her love, how absolutely
the man whom she loves dominates her! How strong he feels with his
cruel right to say: You do no more for love than you have done for
money. They know not what proof to give. A child, says the fable,
having often amused himself by crying “Help! a wolf!” in order to
disturb the labourers in the field, was one day devoured by a Wolf,
because those whom he had so often deceived no longer believed in his
cries for help. It is the same with these unhappy women when they love
seriously. They have lied so often that no one will believe them, and
in the midst of their remorse they are devoured by their love.

Hence those great devotions, those austere retreats from the world, of
which some of them have given an example.

But when the man who inspires this redeeming love is great enough in
soul to receive it without remembering the past, when he gives himself
up to it, when, in short, he loves as he is loved, this man drains at
one draught all earthly emotions, and after such a love his heart will
be closed to every other.”

Lina