city and country folk, artisans and peasants. The book has an air of sincerity, of being the truthful record of a lady’s-maid’s career in Paris and in the country, so that one cannot discuss it as mere vicious raving, and every character introduced is worse than the one that went before. I question if humanity has ever been dragged into such infamous depths with such a singular display of enjoyment in its degradation. I read such charges, and I am stupefied with their divergence from my own personal experience. The French servants I have known have all been excellent creatures, devoted to their mistresses, grateful for any kindness or interest shown them, surprisingly intelligent, honest, sober, of lives of conspicuous virtue. They have the national failing, which is a tendency to insolence on slight provocation—for you cannot reason with French people. They fire up angrily at the least hint of an opinion that displeases them, and their very independence of character makes them sin on the other side of servility. But those monsters of their fiction—where are they to be met with? How do they manage to hide themselves so cleverly from daily scrutiny, if they are, as we are assured, so persistently around us? Have any of the sweet-mannered Eugénies, the Irmas, the Marguerites, the Louises, I meet at the different houses of my friends, who greet me with such cheerful welcome, who take my umbrella or cloak with such suggested sympathy, and put fresh flowers in my room with such graceful pleasure, anything in common with M. Mirbeau’s unspeakable wretch, Mlle. Celestine?