The degradation of a word is one of those curious freaks of manners upon which whole volumes of explanation might be written.  Write to an attorney and address him as “Lawyer So-and-so,” and you insult him as surely as you would insult a wholesale colonial produce merchant by addressing your letter to “Mr. So-and-so, Grocer.”  There are plenty of men of the world who ought to be aware, since the knowledge of such subtle distinctions is their province, that you cannot insult a French writer more cruelly than by calling him un homme de lettres—­a literary man.  The word monsieur is a capital example of the life and death of words.  Abbreviated from monseigneur, once so considerable a title, and even now, in the form of sire, reserved for emperors and kings, it is bestowed indifferently upon all and sundry; while the twin-word messire, which is nothing but its double and equivalent, if by any chance it slips into a certificate of burial, produces an outcry in the Republican papers.

Magistrates, councillors, jurisconsults, judges, barristers, officers for the crown, bailiffs, attorneys, clerks of the court, procurators, solicitors, and agents of various kinds, represent or misrepresent Justice.  The “lawyer” and the bailiff’s men (commonly called “the brokers”) are the two lowest rungs of the ladder.  Now, the bailiff’s man is an outsider, an adventitious minister of justice, appearing to see that judgment is executed; he is, in fact, a kind of inferior executioner employed by the county court.  But the word “lawyer” (homme de loi) is a depreciatory term applied to the legal profession.  Consuming professional jealousy finds similar disparaging epithets for fellow-travelers in every walk of life, and every calling has its special insult.  The scorn flung into the words homme de loi, homme de lettres, is wanting in the plural form, which may be used without offence; but in Paris every profession, learned or unlearned, has its omega, the individual who brings it down to the level of the lowest class; and the written law has its connecting link with the custom right of the streets.  There are districts where the pettifogging man of business, known as Lawyer So-and-So, is still to be found.  M. Fraisier was to the member of the Incorporated Law Society as the money-lender of the Halles, offering small loans for a short period at an exorbitant interest, is to the great capitalist.

Working people, strange to say are as shy of officials as of fashionable restaurants, they take advice from irregular sources as they turn into a little wineshop to drink.  Each rank in life finds its own level, and there abides.  None but a chosen few care to climb the heights, few can feel at ease in the presence of their betters, or take their place among them, like a Beaumarchais letting fall the watch of the great lord who tried to humiliate him.  And if there are few who can even rise to a higher social level, those among them who can throw off their swaddling-clothes are rare and great exceptions.