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:
In 1819 I was living in a thatched cottage situated in the bosom of
the delightful valley l'Isle-Adam. My hermitage neighbored on the park
of Cassan, the sweetest of retreats, the most fascinating in aspect,
the most attractive as a place to ramble in, the most cool and
refreshing in summer, of all places created by luxury and art.
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