was then the poet’s indignant protest. In the present day, the highest functionary prostitutes himself with prerogatives as princely as those of the Duke of Orleans. There is even no longer any magisterial authority for exercising a wholesome restraint, in this direction, upon _the governing class_. Every debauchee is an absolute sovereign, not after the manner of our former monarchs who robbed God through his representatives, but like the Tiberiuses and the Neros, whose only law was their own passions. The scandals of the uncontrolled conduct of certain officials set at defiance all sense of rectitude and indignant feeling. The blows they deal at the rights of the family are so public, so deplorable, and so numerous, that the State might be thought partial to debauchees if we did not know in what an atmosphere the greater part of the men entrusted with high-office for the purpose of directing us are prepared for their work, if we did not especially note their emulation in, and boasting of, the lax morals which obtain among the upper classes. If I specified a few of these offences, our law for libel would consider me guilty—to such a degree does it pay respect to immorality. Let us merely say that no government whose aim might be the destruction of the institution of the family could find either better servants or a better state of affairs by which to accomplish its ends than that of France. Let us speak at least of one of these men whose morals are no longer under the protection of the law.—Reynaud who, in 1861, came up before the Isire Assize Court[44] under the law for the prevention of assassination, was a former public official, that is to say, _a guardian of religion, the family, and propriety_; he had even been foreman of the jury in this court some years previously. As the proceedings at the trial proved, the successive registry-receivers in that district were causing scandal and demoralising it by their illicit intimacies. Reynaud, the murderer of his daughter in a fit of jealous anger against the Registrar, whose mistress she was, was convicted of having committed every kind of outrage upon the family institution. A husband and father, he incessantly solicited his female domestics, day labourers, and the farmers’ daughters &c., on his estates, never letting them alone; he forced them by threats of killing those who were proof against his terrifying intimidations, to the extent that several women lost their health through fear. A farmer gave evidence at the trial that, in one year, three poor servants had been obliged to submit to the monstrous desires of Reynaud, and that others, in a more independent position, had saved themselves from it by flight. A friend of his daughter, overcome by him, was also obliged to yield to solicitations which, in the defence, were toned down into partial violence. Reynaud had, moreover, seduced an idiot, and cruelly left her in great destitution while she