agistrate--her head bound up--her body scarred and bleeding with
wounds, which the drunken ruffian, her lord, has administered: a
poor shopkeeper or mechanic is driven out of his home by the furious
ill-temper of the shrill virago his wife--takes to the public-house--to
evil courses--to neglecting his business--to the gin-bottle--to delirium
tremens--to perdition. Bow Street, and policemen, and the newspaper
reporters, have cognisance and a certain jurisdiction over these vulgar
matrimonial crimes; but in politer company how many murderous assaults
are there by husband or wife--where the woman is not felled by the
actual fist, though she staggers and sinks under blows quite as cruel
and effectual; where, with old wounds yet unhealed, which she strives to
hide under a smiling face from the world, she has to bear up and to be
stricken down and to rise to her feet again, under fresh daily strokes
of torture; where the husband, fond and faithful, has to suffer slights,
coldness, insult, desertion, his children sneered away from their love
for him, his friends driven from his door by jealousy, his happiness
strangled, his whole life embittered, poisoned, destroyed! If you were
acquainted with the history of every family in your street, don't you
know that in two or three of the houses there such tragedies have been
playing? Is not the young mistress of Number 20 already pining at her
husband's desertion? The kind master of Number 30 racking his fevered
brains and toiling through sleepless nights to pay for the jewels on
his wife's neck, and the carriage out of which she ogles Lothario in the
Park? The fate under which man or woman falls, blow of brutal tyranny,
heartless desertion, weight of domestic care too heavy to bear--are
not blows such as these constantly striking people down? In this long
parenthesis we are wandering ever so far away from M. le Duc and Madame
la Duchesse d'Ivry, and from the vivacious Florac's statement regarding
his kinsman, that that woman will kill him.

There is this at least to be said, that if the Duc d'Ivry did die he
was a very old gentleman, and had been a great viveur for at least
threescore years of his life. As Prince de Moncontour in his father's
time before the Revolution, during the Emigration, even after the
Restoration, M. le Duc had vecu with an extraordinary vitality. He
had gone through good and bad fortune: extreme poverty, display and
splendour, affairs of love--affairs of honour