was pregnant; he drove her away with blows with a stick when she came with her mother to ask him for some assistance for the child. This ex-official, who understood the law as applicable to his own case, even boasted at the trial of having bought as many women of the labouring classes as he wished for, by throwing them a five-franc piece as an inducement. “_That is how those things are done_,” he added sardonically, with a consciousness of his right. So far it was well, and the cup would never have been full if he had confined himself to this species of crimes, for none of the facts I have just recounted constituted the smallest delinquency, nor even the slightest responsibility in the eye of our legislation, which, at the same time, discountenances divorce as _an outrage on the family institution_. After the recital of these horrors, the President could say to the accused, “_You have been an honourable man to the verge of the criminal code._” At this trial, the judges, without respect for public decency, put upon the stool of repentence all the women whom the respectable citizen and upright functionary Reynaud had bought for five sous or five francs. Let these female domestics and day labourers, whose honour is worth a few francs, pass in review, and let girls belonging to the wages-earning class be fastened to the pillory! The court did not blush to compromise even a wife and mother who had had dealings with Reynaud: it violated the sanctity of the domestic circle in summoning this woman to give her evidence. The unhappy creature seeking, as in a barbarous age, an asylum at the foot of the altar, knelt down for a whole day in a church, in the hope of escaping the shame of this trial, at which she was questioned, in inquisitorial language, in presence of the public, about the most minute details of her illicit connection with the accused man. After in this way sacrificing the weak, the judges manifested particular leniency to the officials, the lovers of the daughters assassinated by Reynaud, as necessary to the proceedings as the women who figured at them; inviolability, the protectress of their profligacy, prevented justice from summoning them, and even uttering their names; their “_honorabilité_,” kept safe by the letter “h,” suffers them to continue preaching social morality in our departments, and leading the people back to healthy notions of law and duty! To understand the immense mischief which a single profligate man can do, we must refer to our multitudes of Reynauds who have neither killed nor stolen, but who, submitting like himself to the yoke of unbridled passions, sow death wherever they go without being punished for it.[45] In the face of an irresponsibility of such a nature, instead of lamenting lest morality should no longer exist, we should rather wonder that there is any to be found.