pite of everything, look
unwashed;

But the husbands who have obtained the degrading name of "hen-pecked";

Finally the old men who marry young girls.

All these people are _par excellence_ among the predestined.

There is a final class of the predestined whose ill-fortune is almost
certain, we mean restless and irritable men, who are inclined to
meddle and tyrannize, who have a great idea of domestic domination,
who openly express their low ideas of women and who know no more about
life than herrings about natural history. When these men marry, their
homes have the appearance of a wasp whose head a schoolboy has cut
off, and who dances here and there on a window pane. For this sort of
predestined the present work is a sealed book. We do not write any
more for those imbeciles, walking effigies, who are like the statues
of a cathedral, than for those old machines of Marly which are too
weak to fling water over the hedges of Versailles without being in
danger of sudden collapse.

I rarely make my observations on the conjugal oddities with which the
drawing-room is usually full, without recalling vividly a sight which
I once enjoyed in early youth:

In 1819 I was living in a thatched cottage situated in the bosom of
the delightful valley l'Isle-Adam. My hermitage neighbored on the park
of Cassan, the sweetest of retreats, the most fascinating in aspect,
the most attractive as a place to ramble in, the most cool and
refreshing in summer, of all places created by luxury and art. This
verdant country-seat owes its origin to a farmer-general of the good
old times, a certain Bergeret, celebrated for his originality; who
among other fantastic dandyisms adopted the habit of going to the
opera, with his hair powdered in gold; he used to light up his park
for his own solitary delectation and on one occasion ordered a
sumptuous entertainment there, in which he alone took part. This
rustic Sardanapalus returned from Italy so passionately charmed with
the scenery of that beautiful country that, by a sudden freak of
enthusiasm, he spent four or five millions in order to represent in
his park the scenes of which he had pictures in his portfolio. The
most charming contrasts of foliage, the rarest trees, long valleys,
and prospects the most picturesque that could be brought from abroad,
Borromean islands floating on clear eddying streams like so many rays,
which concentrate their various lustres on a single point, on an Isola
Bell