er into her secrets, the Grecians and Latinists who
dine on a thought of Tacitus, sup on a phrase of Thucydides, spend their
life in brushing the dust from library shelves, in keeping guard over a
commonplace book, or a papyrus, are all predestined. So great is their
abstraction or their ecstasy, that nothing that goes on around them
strikes their attention. Their unhappiness is consummated; in full light
of noon they scarcely even perceive it. Oh happy men! a thousand times
happy! Example: Beauzee, returning home after session at the Academy,
surprises his wife with a German. "Did not I tell you, madame, that
it was necessary that I shall go," cried the stranger. "My dear sir,"
interrupted the academician, "you ought to say that I _should_ go!"

Then there come, lyre in hand, certain poets whose whole animal strength
has left the ground floor and mounted to the upper story. They know
better how to mount Pegasus than the beast of old Peter, they rarely
marry, although they are accustomed to lavish the fury of their passions
on some wandering or imaginary Chloris.

But the men whose noses are stained with snuff;

But those who, to their misfortune, have a perpetual cold in their head;

But the sailors who smoke or chew;

But those men whose dry and bilious temperament makes them always look
as if they had eaten a sour apple;

But the men who in private life have certain cynical habits, ridiculous
fads, and who always, in spite 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