its hand. These
chimeras find partisans for a few years. When this rubbish has passed
out of fashion, new fanatics appear on the itinerant theatre; they
banish germs from the world, they say that the sea produced the
mountains, and that men were once fish.

How much charlatanry has been put into history, either by astonishing
the reader with prodigies, by titillating human malignity with satire,
or by flattering the families of tyrants with infamous eulogy?

The wretched species that writes for a living is charlatan in another
way. A poor man who has no trade, who has had the misfortune to go to
college, and who thinks he knows how to write, goes to pay his court to
a bookseller, and asks him for work. The bookseller knows that the
majority of most people who live in houses want to have little
libraries, that they need abridgments and new titles; he orders from the
writer an abridgment of the "History by Rapin-Thoyras," an abridgment of
the "History of the Church," a "Collection of Witty Sayings" drawn from
the "Menagiana," a "Dictionary of Great Men," where an unknown pedant
is placed beside Cicero, and a _sonettiero_ of Italy near Virgil.

Another bookseller orders novels, or translations of novels. "If you
have no imagination," he says to the workman, "you will take a few of
the adventures in 'Cyrus,' in 'Gusman d'Alfarache,' in the 'Secret
Memoirs of a Gentleman of Quality,' or 'Of a Lady of Quality'; and from
the total you will prepare a volume of four hundred pages at twenty sous
the sheet."

Another bookseller gives the gazettes and almanacs for ten years past to
a man of genius. "You will make me an extract of all that, and you will
bring it me back in three months under the name of 'Faithful History of
the Times,' by the Chevalier de Trois Etoiles, Lieutenant of the Navy,
employed in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs."

Of this kind of book there are about fifty thousand in Europe; and it
all passes just like the secret of whitening the skin, of darkening the
hair, and the universal panacea.

_CIVIL LAWS_

EXTRACT FROM SOME NOTES FOUND AMONG A LAWYER'S PAPERS, WHICH MAYBE MERIT
EXAMINATION.

Let the punishments of criminals be useful. A hanged man is good for
nothing, and a man condemned to public works still serves the country,
and is a living lesson.

* * * * *

Let all laws be clear, uniform and precise: to interpret laws is almost
always to corrupt them.