Yes: in saying the law was _too dear_ for the poor, he said the truth.
To plead before the civil tribunals is to incur enormous expenses, quite
out of the reach of artisans, who barely exist on their scanty wages.

Let a mother or father of a family belonging to this ever-sacrificed class
wish to obtain an obliteration of the conjugal tie; let them have all right
to obtain it: will they obtain it? No; for there is no workman in a
condition to spend four or five hundred francs for the onerous formalities
of such a judgment.

Yet the poor have no other life than a domestic one; the good or bad
conduct of the head of an artisan's family is not only a question of
morality; but of _bread_. The fate of a woman of the people, such as
we have endeavored to paint, does it deserve less interest, less
protection, than that of a rich woman, who suffers from the bad conduct or
infidelities of her husband, think you?

Nothing is more worthy of pity, doubtless, than the griefs of the heart.
But when to these griefs is added, for an unfortunate mother, the misery of
her children, is it not monstrous that the poverty of this woman places her
without the law, and leaves her and her family without defense against the
odious treatment of a drunken and worthless husband?

Yet this monstrosity exists. [Footnote: Translator's Note.--How singular
that, as this new edition of the _sensational romancist's_ work is
issued, the Imperial Parliament should have a bill to redress this very
oversight before it.]

And a liberated criminal can, in this circumstance as in others, deny, with
right and reason, the impartiality of the institutions in the name of which