in (untranslatable) alphabetic order in
the original.--Editor

But these incidents of marriage have furnished matter for thirty
thousand comedies and a hundred thousand romances.

Physiology, for the third and last time I ask you--What is your
meaning?

So far everything is commonplace as the pavement of the street,
familiar as a crossway. Marriage is better known than the Barabbas of
the Passion. All the ancient ideas which it calls to light permeate
literature since the world is the world, and there is not a single
opinion which might serve to the advantage of the world, nor a
ridiculous project which could not find an author to write it up, a
printer to print it, a bookseller to sell it and a reader to read it.

Allow me to say to you like Rabelais, who is in every sense our
master:

"Gentlemen, God save and guard you! Where are you? I cannot see you;
wait until I put on my spectacles. Ah! I see you now; you, your wives,
your children. Are you in good health? I am glad to hear it."

But it is not for you that I am writing. Since you have grown-up
children that ends the matter.

Ah! it is you, illustrious tipplers, pampered and gouty, and you,
tireless pie-cutters, favorites who come dear; day-long
pantagruellists who keep your private birds, gay and gallant, and who
go to tierce, to sexts, to nones, and also to vespers and compline and
never tire of going.

It is not for you that the _Physiology of Marriage_ is addressed, for
you are not married and may you never be married. You herd of bigots,
snails, hypocrites, dotards, lechers, booted for pilgrimage to Rome,
disguised and marked, as it were, to deceive the world. Go back, you
scoundrels, out of my sight! Gallows birds are ye all--now in the
devil's name will you not begone? There are none left now but the good
souls who love to laugh; not the snivelers who burst into tears in
prose or verse, whatever their subject be, who make people sick with
their odes, their sonnets, their meditation; none of these dreamers,
but certain old-fashioned pantagruellists who don't think twice about
it when they are invited to join a banquet or provoked to make a
repartee, who can take pleasure in a book like _Pease and the Lard_
with commentary of Rabelais, or in the one entitled _The Dignity of
Breeches_, and who esteem highly the fair books of high degree, a
quarry hard to run down and redoubtable to wrestle with.

It no longer does to laugh at a government, my f