Et je verrais mourir frère, enfants, mere et femme,
Que je m'en soucierais autant que de cela ![1]
The device most in use, however, for making a profession ludicrous is to confine it, so to say, within the four corners of its own particular jargon. Judge, doctor and soldier are made to apply the language of law, medicine and strategy to the everyday affairs of life, as though they had became incapable of talking like ordinary people. As a rule, this kind of the ludicrous is rather coarse. It becomes more refined, however, as we have already said, if it reveals some peculiarity of character in addition to a professional habit. We will instance only Régnard's Joueur, who expresses himself with the utmost originality in terms borrowed from gambling, giving his valet the name of Hector, and calling his betrothed
Pallas, du nom connu de la Dame de Pique ;[2]
or Molière's Femmes savantes, where the comic element evidently consists largely in the translation of ideas of a scientific nature into
