“Denied of one fat vice to take their fill,
Morsels of several serve them for a meal.”
Footnote 36:
The protection of the student is insufficient, even in the special
schools which have pupil-boarders. They are, it is true, supposed to
have guardians, but, in reality, left to themselves twice a week, and
on some days, as extra holidays, when they come back, they proceed to
get a certificate of good behaviour signed by a guardian, who, busied
with his own affairs, cannot have known how they spend their time.
Footnote 37:
Assize Court of the Seine, sitting of February 4, 1866.
Footnote 38:
When we reflect that foreign youths learn such manners in France, we
are no longer surprised that the profligate, and, too often, the
governing portion of Europe, should consider the investigation to
discover the father of disowned children inconvenient.
Footnote 39:
One of our well-known courtesans, in her memoirs, brings to mind one
of her former supporters, who was then a public official in a
provincial town, and who is sending her stolen expressions of regret,
and looking upon his appointment as a post of insupportable
banishment, far from the social circle in which he lived with her.
Footnote 40:
Bishops asserted the Church’s right of deposing adulterous princes,
fornicators, &c., and of absolving their subjects from every oath of
fidelity to them. (See M. Guizot, “History of Civilization in
Europe.”)
Footnote 41:
Then (under Henri II) Anne du Bourg thus expresses herself:—“But what!
crimes worthy of death, blasphemies, adulteries, horrible debauches,
perjuries are committed, with impunity, in the face of heaven, and
every day new punishments are invented against men whose only crime is
having made, owing to the teachings of Holy Scripture, the discovery
of the Roman baseness, and having called for its wholesome reform.”
The Councillor du Four, in his turn, exclaims: “We must understand
well who they are that trouble the Church, lest that should happen
that Elijah told king Ahab, ‘It is you who trouble Israel.’”
Footnote 42:
Saint Simon, endeavouring to have an illicit intimacy of the Duke of
Orleans broken off, showed him the opinion existing against him.
“There is,” said he, “a general estrangement, which has the complexion
of rage, because _no one_ can endure in a grandson of France, at the
age of 35, an outrage upon good morals which the magistrate and the
police would long ago have punished in any one who might not have been
high enough in rank to be shielded from censure.” He puts before him
the distinction and honours that attach to the moral men from amongst
whom Louis XIV has chosen his generals and advisers, whilst noblemen
of high birth are deprived of the distinctions of their class, debased
in their profligate habits, unknown or despised at court, left to
their own shame and to wretchedness, expelled from the meanest
societies, objects of the public blame and contempt, and reduced to
find themselves too despicable for the blows people disdain to inflict
upon them. Elsewhere, St. Simon further caused the reception of
Villars by the parliament to be looked upon as an enormity, because,
he said, “_against the most common practice_, no peer was taken as a
witness of his life and manners, which will afford cause for public
dissertation; had he so acted from respect or from shame, or from a
fear of being rejected? I was pained,” he adds, “to find myself at so
humiliating a ceremonial.”
Footnote 43: