Mauprat quotes

“I beg your pardon, gentlemen,” he said. “I am afraid you find me an odd mixture. Ah, you see but a short distance.

I am an old branch, happily torn from a vile trunk and transplanted into good soil, but still knotted and rough like the wild holly of the original stock.

I have, believe me, had no little trouble in reaching the state of comparative gentleness and calm in which you behold me. Alas! if I dared, I should reproach Providence with a great injustice—that of having allotted me a life as short as other men’s.

I have, believe me, had no little trouble in reaching the state of comparative gentleness and calm in which you behold me. Alas! if I dared, I should reproach Providence with a great injustice—that of having allotted me a life as short as other men’s.

When one has to struggle for forty or fifty years to transform one’s self from a wolf into a man, one ought to live a hundred years longer to enjoy one’s victory.

Yet what good would that do me?” he added in a tone of sadness. “The kind fairy who transformed me is here no more to take pleasure in her work. Bah! it is quite time to have done with it all.”

The tiniest village would have been sufficient for the creation and maintenance of a public opinion. There, however, there were only scattered cottages and isolated farms; wastes and woods so separated the families from one another that the exercise of any mutual control was impossible.

Shame is stronger than conscience.

I need not tell you of all the bonds of infamy that united masters and slaves. Debauchery, extortion, and fraud were both precept and example for my youth, and life went on merrily. All notions of justice were scoffed at;

His fierce hatred of me arose from the fact that he could not succeed in depraving me; my rugged, headstrong, and unsociable nature preserved me from his vile seductions.

It is possible that I had not any strong tendencies to virtue; to hatred I luckily had.

Rather than do the bidding of my tyrant I would have suffered a thousand deaths. And so I grew up without conceiving any affection for vice.

For a few seconds he stood motionless with surprise and fury. Then suddenly, taking the palpitating victim by the feet, he lifted it up, and, coming towards us, cried in a voice of thunder:

“Which of you wretches threw that stone?”

The boy who had been walking behind, flew with the swiftness of the wind;

However, I would have preferred to die a thousand deaths rather than ask shelter of the man in Gazeau Tower, even had he granted it gracefully.

My pride was bleeding more than my flesh.

I started off at a run, heedless of all risks. The path made a thousand turns; a thousand other paths kept crossing it. When I reached the plain I found myself in a pasture surrounded by hedges. There every trace of the path disappeared.

When any of his companions spoke ill of me, he would take up my cause, and declare that I was merely somewhat hasty and not really bad at heart.

Ah, it is the gentle, resigned souls of the humble that keep up the pride and roughness of the great.

Well, we were trying to trap larks when my sabot-shot page, who always hunted about ahead of me, came back, saying in his rude dialect:

“Oh, children, children!” he said. “See how the thing reasons!

Out of the mouths of children cometh truth.

”

I was in a state of great perplexity, and I cast harassed glances now at her, now at the doors, which I fancied every moment would be thrown wide open amid roars of laughter from my uncles.

This woman was beautiful as the day.

I do not believe there has ever lived a woman as lovely as she. It is not I alone who say so; she has left a reputation for beauty which has not yet died out in her province.

She knew not what it was to suffer; she knew not what it was to distrust and dread. This, indeed, was the first trial of her life, and it was I, brute that I was, who made her undergo it.

I took her for a gipsy, and she was an angel of purity.

She was my young cousin (or aunt, after the Breton fashion), Edmée de Mauprat, the daughter of M.

In me the poor girl was husbanding her one hope, and was fearful of losing it. Ah, if I had only been able to realize what such a woman as she was, and what my own position meant! But I was unable then.

I had but one fixed idea⁠—the idea which a wolf may have on a like occasion.

At last, as my only answer to all her entreaties was, “Do you love me, or are you fooling me?”

From this moment the victory was hers. I no longer had power to will what I wished.

The lynx in me was subdued; the man rose in its place; and I believe that my voice had a human ring, as I cried for the first time in my life:

“Yes, I love you! Yes, I love you!”

It took up its abode in me side by side with a violent love for his daughter, nor did I even dream of pitting one of these feelings against the other. I was all yearning, all instinct, all desire.

I had the passions of a man in the soul of a child.

I went into the garden, and strode up and down the walks at a furious rate. My anger gave place to the most profound melancholy. Edmée, proud and daring, seemed to me more desirable than ever.

It is the nature of all desire to be excited and nourished by opposition.

I felt that I had offended her, and that she did not love me, that perhaps she would never love me;

“Because they were brutes and tyrants to creatures weaker than themselves.

Whenever one makes one’s self feared one runs the risk of being deceived.

In your childhood, when John used to beat you, did you never try to escape his brutal punishment by disguising your little faults?”

The blood of the Mauprats will never flow as smoothly as other people’s. Have a care for my pride, then, you know so well what pride is, and do not ever presume upon rights you have acquired.

Affection cannot be commanded; it must be implored or inspired.

Act so that I may always love you; never tell me that I am forced to love you.”

“Look at that; look how beautiful it is!”

He is the only peasant I have ever known to admire the sky; or, at least, he is the only one I have ever seen who was conscious of his admiration.

“Why, Master Patience,” I said to him, “do you think I might be an honest man if I chose? Do you think that I am not one already?”

of some change meeting, or some exchange of looks between De la Marche and myself that he may fancy he has detected; a breath of air perhaps! What is to be done? Were I to grieve, would my tears wash away the past?

We cannot tear out a single page of our lives; but we can throw the book into the fire.

Though I should weep from night till morn, would that prevent Destiny from having, in a fit of ill-humour, taken me out hunting, sent me astray in the woods, and made me stumble across a Mauprat, who led me to his den, where I escaped …

Edmée stopped on the threshold and hesitated a moment. Then, yielding to the kindly impulses of her heart, she overcame her fears and returned towards me.

Pausing a few yards from my chair, she said:

“Bernard, you are unhappy. Tell me; is it my fault?”

To her I might have been favourably inclined because of her ignorance, had she not gloried in this, and tried to emphasize her difference from the others by a piquant ingenuousness.

One day I discovered that she had plenty of wit, and straightway I abhorred her.

Edmée alone preserved all the freshness of sincerity and all the distinction of natural grace. Sitting on a sofa by the side of M.

“The crime would be that hitherto you have lied in telling me that you did not love him.”

“Hitherto is saying a good deal,” she rejoined, looking at me fixedly;

“we have not discussed the matter since last year. At that time it was possible that I did not love Adhemar very much, and at present it might be possible that I loved him more than you.

He made him swallow a few drops; its strength revived him. The hidalgo excused his weakness on the score of fatigue and the heat. He would not or could not assign it to its real sense.

There are souls who die out, after burning with unsurpassable moral beauty and grandeur, without ever having found a way, and even without ever having felt the need, of revealing themselves to others.

When Patience, who was as demonstrative as his friend was the contrary, had recovered from his first transports, he turned to me and said:

and I found that, so far from having lost her beauty, she had attained ideal perfection. Still, I remember several persons at that time used to declare that she had “changed very much,” which with them meant that she had greatly deteriorated.

Beauty, however, is like a temple in which the profane see naught but the external magnificence.

The divine mystery of the artist’s thought reveals itself only to profound sympathy, and the inspiration in each detail of the sublime work remains unseen by the eyes of the vulgar.

For the first time in the year I felt a chilliness in the air. I think that all men are filled with an involuntary sadness at the approach of the inclement season.

In the first hoar-frosts there is something which bids man remember the approaching dissolution of his own being.

My companion and I had traversed woods and heaths without saying a single word; we had made a long detour to avoid Gazeau Tower, which I felt I could not bear to look upon again.

“Good,” he said; “it will be like old times when the peasants used to eat at the table of the seigneurs of Roche-Mauprat. You are doing the same, Monsieur Bernard, you are quite right.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied very coldly; “only I behave thus with those who owe me money, not those to whom I owe it.”

This reply, and the word “sir,” frightened him so much that he was at great pains to excuse himself from sitting down to table. However, I insisted, as I wished to give him the measure of my character at once.

“She has strange whims; but nothing will persuade me to believe that she does not love you. She does not want to explain matters yet.

Woman’s will is God’s will.

”

“There you are wrong,” replied the abbé. “

You should always fear a coward, because he strikes from behind while you are expecting him in front.

If John Mauprat were not a Trappist, if the papers he showed me were lies, the prior of the Carmelites is too shrewd and cautious to have let himself be deceived.

“I will undergo them if necessary,” rejoined the abbé, with an imperceptible smile of pride, and such a dignified bearing that all the women were touched.

Women are excellent judges of things that are delicately beautiful.

“Very good,” replied the public prosecutor. “Do you intend to persist in this course of silence?”

There was a wild uproar, and one and all, conscious of their dignity and power, cast away personal prejudices in order to combine for their common rights.

Thus, a noble impetuosity and a true word are sometimes sufficient to bring back the masses who have long been led astray by sophism.

A respite was granted, and I was led back to my prison amid the applause of the people. Marcasse followed me. Patience disappeared without giving me a chance to thank him.

… of resistance and the sense of human dignity, dulled in me and paralyzed, as it were, by grief, suddenly awoke again, and in this hour I realized that man is not made for that selfish concentration of despair which is known as resignation or stoicism.

No man can cease to have a regard for his own honour without at the same time ceasing to feel the respect due to the principle of honour.

If it is grand to sacrifice personal glory and life to the mysterious decrees of conscience, it is cowardly to abandon both to the fury of an unjust persecution.

“

Let them take me to the scaffold now; I am king of all the earth!

”

If Edmée had not triumphantly defended me by her confession, she had at least roused the greatest interest in my favour.

A man who is loved by a beautiful woman carries with him a talisman that makes him invulnerable; all feel that his life is of greater value than other lives.

Edmée still had to submit to many questions; she set in their proper light the facts which had been misrepresented by Mademoiselle Leblanc. True, she spared me considerably;