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 friend, since it has
invented means to raise fifteen hundred millions by taxation. High
ecclesiastics, monks and nuns are no longer so rich that we can drink
with them; but let St. Michael come, he who chased the devil from
heaven, and we shall perhaps see the good time come back again! There is
only one thing in France at the present moment which remains a laughing
matter, and that is marriage. Disciples of Panurge, ye are the only
readers I desire. You know how seasonably to take up and lay down a
book, how to get the most pleasure out of it, to understand the hint in
a half word--how to suck nourishment from a marrow-bone.

The men of the microscope who see nothing but a speck, the
census-mongers--have they reviewed the whole matter