(for there are many houses _où le ventre anoblit_), may carry arms and be a gentleman. Even without this maternal warrant, there are short cuts to rank; for the snob is of no generation or society, but pan-endemic, so to speak, in all highly civilized centres. Does not Madame de Sévigné paint for us a certain little Lord “who is all honey, especially to dukes and peers”? Does not Molière show us his Arnolphe, who ennobles himself with scant ado and calls himself M. de la Souche? “Et d’un vieux tronc pourri de votre métairie Vous faites dans le monde un nom de seigneurie. * * * * * Je sais un paysan qu’on appelait Gros-Pierre, Qui, n’ayant pour tout bien qu’un seul quartier de terre, Y fit tout à l’entour faire un fossé bourbeux Et de Monsieur de l’Isle en prit le nom pompeux.” IV While Molière shows us the peasant growing fat on the fruits of his master’s recklessness and absence, La Bruyère, with his profound and moral vision of things, reveals the other face of absenteeism: the diminished standard of virtue, decency, comfort, in the deserted villages; the peasants sinking almost to the condition of savages, spending nothing on themselves, and living only in one thought--how to save enough to buy another rood of land. Meanwhile the soil itself, ill cultivated, and prized by its absent owners merely as a game-preserve or an investment, was soon overgrown with rush and bramble, and returned to marsh or bog or forest, as of old. Few spectacles can have been more harrowing to the social or moral eye than the French villages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. “There be certain fierce and shy wild animals, male and female, which are scattered up and down our country-side. They are sunburned to a sort of dull black, and walk bent towards the earth they delve; on straightening themselves, they show, it is true, a human face, and, in fact, they are men and women; they withdraw from the fields at nightfall to their dens, where they sup on black bread, roots, and water. They spare their fellow-men the labours of seed-time and harvest, and do not deserve to lack the bread they sow.” Could Swift have exhaled more generously his _sæva indignatio_? La Bruyère, the deepest and tenderest mind of his generation, was therefore a man of wrath. “Seizures for debt, and the bailiff’s man in the house, the removal of furniture distrained, prisons, punishment, tortures, all these things may be just and legal. But what I can never see without the renewal of astonishment is the ferocity of man to man.”