ge, all who can may laugh.
Weigh anchor; hoist sail! You know exactly the point from which you
start. You have this advantage over a great many books that are written.

As for our fancy of laughing while we weep, and of weeping while we
laugh, as the divine Rabelais drank while he ate and ate while he drank;
as for our humor, to put Heraclitus and Democritus on the same page
and to discard style or premeditated phrase--if any of the crew mutiny,
overboard with the doting cranks, the infamous classicists, the dead and
buried romanticists, and steer for the blue water!

Everybody perhaps will jeeringly remark that we are like those who say
with smiling faces, "I am going to tell you a story that will make you
laugh!" But it is the proper thing to joke when speaking of marriage!
In short, can you not understand that we consider marriage as a trifling
ailment to which all of us are subject and upon which this volume is a
monograph?

"But you, your bark or your work starts off like those postilions who
crack their whips because their passengers are English. You will not
have galloped at full speed for half a league before you dismount to
mend a trace or to breathe your horses. What is the good of blowing the
trumpet before victory?"

Ah! my dear pantagruellists, nowadays to claim success is to obtain
it, and since, after all, great works are only due to the expansion of
little ideas, I do not see why I should not pluck the laurels, if only
for the purpose of crowning those dirty bacon faces who join us in
swallowing a dram. One moment, pilot, let us not start without making
one little definition.

Reader, if from time to time you meet in this work the terms virtue or
virtuous, let us understand that virtue means a certain labored facility
by which a wife keeps her heart for her husband; at any rate, that the
word is not used in a general sense, and I leave this distinction to the
natural sagacity of all.

MEDITATION II. MARRIAGE STATISTICS.

The administration has been occupied for nearly twenty years in
reckoning how many acres of woodland, meadow, vineyard and fallow are
comprised in the area of France. It has not stopped there, but has also
tried to learn the number and species of the animals to be found there.
Scientific men have gone still further; they have reckoned up the cords
of wood, the pounds of beef, the apples and eggs consumed in Paris. But
no one has yet undertaken either in the name of marital