t are to be reckoned the husbands whom
business, position or public office calls from their houses and detains
for a definite time. It is these who are the standard-bearers of the
brotherhood.

Among them, we would reckon magistrates, holding office during pleasure
or for life, and obliged to remain at the Palace for the greater portion
of the day; other functionaries sometimes find means to leave their
office at business hours; but a judge or a public prosecutor, seated on
his cushion of lilies, is bound even to die during the progress of the
hearing. There is his field of battle.

It is the same with the deputies and peers who discuss the laws, of
ministers who share the toils of the king, of secretaries who work with
the ministers, of soldiers on campaign, and indeed with the corporal
of the police patrol, as the letter of Lafleur, in the _Sentimental
Journey_, plainly shows.

Next to the men who are obliged to be absent from home at certain fixed
hours, come the men whom vast and serious undertakings leave not
one minute for love-making; their foreheads are always wrinkled with
anxiety, their conversation is generally void of merriment.

At the head of these unfortunates we must place the bankers, who toil
in the acquisition of millions, whose heads are so full of calculations
that the figures burst through their skulls and range themselves in
columns of addition on their foreheads.

These millionaires, forgetting most of the time the sacred laws of
marriage and the attention due to the tender flower which they have
undertaken to cultivate, never think of watering it or of defending
it from the heat and cold. They scarcely recognize the fact that the
happiness of their spouses is in their keeping; if they ever do remember
this, it is at table, when they see seated before them a woman in rich
array, or when a coquette, fearing their brutal repulse, comes, gracious
as Venus, to ask them for cash--Oh! it is then, that they recall,
sometimes very vividly, the rights specified in the two hundred and
thirteenth article of the civil code, and their wives are grateful
to them; but like the heavy tariff which the law lays upon foreign
merchandise, their wives suffer and pay the tribute, in virtue of the
axiom which says: "There is no pleasure without pain."

The men of science who spend whole months in gnawing at the bone of an
antediluvian monster, in calculating the laws of nature, when there is
an opportunity to pe