A young man of good family catches syphilis a month before his wedding, is told by a quack that he can marry safely, and does. Brieux's play was banned in France and prosecuted in America; Sinclair novelised it in 1913 to get the argument past the censors, having already spent seven weeks undercover in the Chicago stockyards to write The Jungle. It is a public-health pamphlet with characters, and it worked.