ome facial appearance, some telling
attitude, some brief and topical scene, by such specimen and shortcuts,
so well chosen and detailed that they provide a summary of the
innumerable series of analogous cases. In this way, the vague, fleeting
object is suddenly arrested, brought to bear, and then gauged and
weighed, like some impalpable gas collected and kept in a graduated
transparent glass tube.--Accordingly, at the Council of State, while the
others, either jurists or administrators, see abstractions, articles of
the law and precedents, he sees people as they are--the Frenchman, the
Italian, the German; that of the peasant, the workman, the bourgeois,
the noble, the returned emigre,[1162] the soldier, the officer and the
functionary--everywhere the individual man as he is, the man who plows,
manufactures, fights, marries, brings forth children, toils, enjoys
himself, and dies.--Nothing is more striking than the contrast between
the dull, grave arguments advanced by the wise official editor, and
Napoleon's own words caught on the wing, at the moment, vibrating and
teeming with illustrations and imagery.[1163] Apropos of divorce, the
principle of which he wishes to maintain:

"Consult, now, national manners and customs. Adultery is no phenomenon;
it is common enough--une affaire de canape... There must be some curb on
women who commit adultery for trinkets, poetry, Apollo, and the muses,
etc."

But if divorce be allowed for incompatibility of temper you undermine
marriage; the fragility of the bond will be apparent the moment the
obligation is contracted;

"it is just as if a man said to himself, 'I am going to marry until I
feel different.'"

Nullity of marriage must not be too often allowed; once a marriage is
made it is a serious matter to undo it.

"Suppose that, in marrying my cousin just arrived from the Indies, I wed
an adventuress. She bears me children, and I then discover she is not my
cousin--is that marriage valid? Does not public morality demand that it
should be so considered? There has been a mutual exchange of hearts, of
transpiration."

On the right of children to be supported and fed although of age, he
says:

"Will you allow a father to drive a girl of fifteen out of his house? A
father worth 60,000 francs a year might say to his son, 'You are stout
and fat; go and turn plowman.' The children of a rich father, or of one
in good circumstances, are always entitled to the paternal porridge.
St