The Tenth Commandment

The Tenth Commandment is presented as a prohibition against desiring a neighbor’s house, wife, servants, animals, or anything else belonging to him. In the conversation between Mario and Emmanuelle, it is not treated as an isolated religious maxim but as a revealing statement about how desire is classified, owned, and policed. Mario’s reading turns the commandment into evidence that conventional morality places women within a hierarchy of property, while the wider discussion contrasts such restrictions with erotic freedom, imaginative invention, and the courage to defy fear.

Text and Property

Mario insists that he is not manipulating his sources or reading them between the lines. He takes the commandment from the Decalogue as transmitted from Sinai by Moses and directs attention to its explicit catalogue: the neighbor’s house, wife, male and female servants, ox, donkey, and anything else belonging to the neighbor. The wording places the wife in the same grammatical field as buildings, laborers, livestock, and possessions. For Mario, this is precisely where the commandment’s force lies: its implications are not hidden in an obscure allegory but exposed by the structure of the list itself.

His interpretation is deliberately severe. He argues that the Eternal has assigned woman a position among the farm and the cattle, alongside the rest of the workforce, and not even at the front of the hierarchy. As a wife, she stands behind the brick and the hut; as a servant, she ranks below a stable hand and only slightly above horned animals and a donkey. The commandment therefore becomes, in Mario’s account, a document of possession rather than a neutral appeal to restraint. Desire is condemned because the desired object has already been placed inside another man’s domain.

Mario’s Historical Attack

Mario connects the commandment to his broader attack on inherited moral institutions. He rejects the claim that the Middle Ages simply invented love, arguing instead that medieval culture made love hateful by enclosing it within religious and feudal discipline. The commandment belongs to that larger history because its prohibition presupposes the legitimacy of the very arrangement it protects: a man’s right to define a wife, a servant, and even animals as things that belong to him.

In this account, clerical morality tried to deprive human beings of the desire for pleasure through a poisoned gift of moral language. Mario evokes chastity belts as the material residue of that project: restraints once fastened by earthly lords around the bodies of their women and female animals, now reduced to rusting fragments preserved in museums. The image shifts the commandment from sacred stone to corroded historical machinery. Time may destroy the institutions that enforced the rule, but Mario adds that what survives after time has judged false morality is the only morality worth retaining.

Desire Against Nature and Fear

The commandment’s prohibition is set against Mario’s definition of eroticism as a victory of the dream over nature. He argues that erotic invention makes realities out of acts that biology would call impossible or that convention would call unnatural. Erotic freedom therefore depends not on obedience to inherited limits but on youth, freedom of spirit, love of truth, and a purity unrelated to custom or convention. It requires courage because it confronts the standards that claim to define what bodies may do and whom they may desire.

Within that framework, the Tenth Commandment represents the moral order that eroticism challenges. The commandment treats desire as an encroachment upon another man’s property; Mario treats desire as an assertion that persons and pleasures cannot be reduced to proprietary categories. His argument does not merely replace one rule with its opposite. It makes transgression meaningful by preserving the visibility of the rule being crossed: the force of erotic rebellion comes from confronting the prohibition, not from pretending that no prohibition exists.

Mario identifies the deepest enemies of eroticism as stupidity and cowardice, especially the fear of being different, thinking independently, and allowing oneself to be happy. He associates that fear with conformity, respect for taboos and rites, hatred of imagination, rejection of novelty, hypocrisy, shame, and cruelty. The Tenth Commandment thus participates in a larger symbolic struggle between a world organized by inherited ownership and taboo and an erotic ethic founded on imaginative freedom.

Dramatic and Social Consequences

The commandment’s logic is not confined to religious history. Elsewhere in the same conversation, the characters acknowledge that smoking opium is forbidden just as making love outside marriage is forbidden, and that police intervention could lead to imprisonment. These remarks place religious prohibition beside state enforcement and sexual convention. The result is a layered system in which conduct may be condemned by scripture, marriage, or the police, while the characters knowingly test the boundaries established by each authority.

The contrast also clarifies why the commandment matters to the book’s erotic philosophy. Mario does not present freedom as the absence of danger. The possibility of arrest remains real, and the law can translate forbidden pleasure into prison. Yet the existence of punishment does not persuade him that the prohibition is morally sound. Instead, risk becomes part of the struggle between regulated respectability and the refusal to let fear determine the limits of experience.

The Commandment Recast

The Tenth Commandment finally functions as a miniature of the book’s larger conflict over whether desire should serve property, marriage, and institutional order or become an independent form of human invention. Its catalogue of possessions allows Mario to expose the patriarchal assumptions embedded in a supposedly universal moral prohibition. Its presence in a discussion of eroticism allows the narrative to move from textual interpretation to bodily freedom, from ancient command to modern defiance.

The rule is therefore important less as a plot mechanism than as an ideological object placed under pressure. Mario reads it aloud, isolates its categories, and turns its literal language against the moral world that invokes it. Emmanuelle’s position in the exchange gives the interpretation an immediate human focus: the abstract “wife” listed among a man’s possessions becomes a woman listening to the argument and confronting the historical grammar of her supposed status. The commandment survives in the scene as both prohibition and provocation, a law whose authority is challenged by the very desire it seeks to name and contain.