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 my observations on the conjugal oddities with which the drawing-room is usually full, without recalling vividly a sight which I once enjoyed in early youth: