Robert Nye's elegant essay rightly puts the PaCS, and the debates about it into a historical context of French natalism. At least since the late nineteenth century, reproduction has been the raison d'être of the married couple and the state has often made fertility synonymous with patriotism. From this has followed all manner of representations, many of them contradictory. Although it surely was the case, as Nys shows, that marriage was eroticized and marital love idealized, it was also the case that reproduction and sexual satisfaction were considered separate domains.