Parisians in the Country quotes

After the Saturnalia of intellectual communism, after the last struggles of many civilizations concentrating all the treasures of the world on a single spot, must not the darkness of barbarism invariably supervene?

The commercial traveler is to ideas what coaches are to men and things.

He carts them about, he sets them moving, brings them into impact. He loads himself at the centre of enlightenment with a supply of beams which he scatters among torpid communities.

He never sees to the bottom of things; he learns only the names of men and places, only the surface of things; he has his own foot-rule, and measures everything by that standard; his glance glides over all he sees, and never penetrates the depths.

He is inquisitive about everything, and really cares for nothing.

A scoffer, always ready with a political song, and apparently equally attached to all parties, he is generally patriotic at heart.

… to dun the customers who are in arrears till they have renewed their policies, and frighten and excite them by fearful tales of fires.—Eloquence, the gift of the gab, is, in fact, nine-tenths of the matter in the ways and means of working our business.”

To talk⁠—to make oneself heard⁠—is not this seduction?

A nation with two Chambers, a woman with two ears, alike are lost! Eve and the Serpent are the perennial myth of a daily recurring fact which began, and will probably only end with the world.

To talk—to make oneself heard—is not this seduction?

A nation with two Chambers, a woman with two ears, alike are lost!

Eve and the Serpent are the perennial myth of a daily recurring fact which began, and will probably only end with the world.

Some day, perhaps, there may be an Exchange for ideas; but even now, good or bad, ideas have their price, are regarded as a crop imported, transferred, and sold, can be realized, and are viewed as an investment.

When there are no ideas in the market speculators try to bring words into fashion, to give them the consistency of an idea, and live on those words as birds live on millet.

Nay, do not laugh! A word is as good as an idea in a country where the ticket on the bale is thought more of than the contents.

When there are no ideas in the market speculators try to bring words into fashion, to give them the consistency of an idea, and live on those words as birds live on millet.

Nay, do not laugh! A word is as good as an idea in a country where the ticket on the bale is thought more of than the contents.

Have we not seen the book trade thriving on the word “picturesqe” when literature had sealed the doom of the word “fantastic.”

“Subscribers are the fools who cannot understand that it costs more to forge ahead in the realm of intellect than to travel all over Europe,” is the speculator’s view.

So there is a constant struggle going on between the dilatory public which declines to pay the Paris taxes and the collectors who, living on their percentages, baste that public with new ideas, lard it with undertakings, roast it with prospectuses, spit it on flattery, and at last eat it up with some new sauce in which it gets caught and intoxicated like a fly in treacle.

What has not been done in France since 1830 to stimulate the zeal, the conceit of the intelligent and progressive masses? Titles, medals, diplomas, a sort of Legion of Honor invented for the vulgar martyrs, have crowded on each other’s heels.

“A pretty line of business indeed!”

“Well, but listen; if you go on talking so much, you will find yourself in the right.”

“I choose always to be in the right! I may say you are a cool hand tonight.”

To this question there is no answer.

Go yourself to that Turkey in France, and there you will stay, indolent, idle, and happy.

Though you were as ambitious as Napoleon, or a poet like Byron, an irresistible, indescribable influence would compel you to keep your poetry to yourself, and reduce your most ambitious schemes to daydreams.

“monsieur, if you were not a man of superior intelligence”—Margaritis bowed—“I should restrict myself to setting forth the material advantages of this concern; but its psychological value is worthy of your attention. Mark me!

Of all forms of social wealth, time is the most precious; to save time is to grow rich, is it not?

Now is there anything which takes up more time in our lives than anxiety as to what I may call boiling the pot—a homely metaphor, but clearly stating the question?

Civilization at large will refuse to advance money to this man, who, in thought, dominates over civilization, who will some day dominate over it by his brush, his chisel, by words, or ideas, or a system.

Civilization is merciless. She has no bread for the great men who provide her with luxuries; she feeds them on abuse and mockery, the gilded slut!

The expression is a strong one; but I will not retract it.—Well, your misprized great man comes to us; we recognize his greatness, we bow to him respectfully, we listen to him, and he says to us:

At last everybody made insolent game of the great qualities of the woman who had thus roused the enmity of the ladies of Sancerre. And they ended by denying a superiority—after all, merely comparative!—which emphasized their ignorance, and did not forgive it.

Where the whole population is hunchbacked, a straight shape is the monstrosity; Dinah was regarded as monstrous and dangerous, and she found herself in a desert.

Astonished at seeing the women of the neighborhood only at long intervals, and for visits of a few minutes, Dinah asked Monsieur de Clagny the reason of this state of things.

After making every sacrifice that a well-bred woman can make, and placing herself entirely in the right, Madame de la Baudraye was so rash as to say to a false friend who condoled with her on her isolation:

“I would rather have my bowl empty than with anything in it!”

This speech produced a terrible effect on Sancerre, and was cruelly retorted on the Sappho of Saint-Satur when, seeing her childless after five years of married life, little de la Baudraye became a byword for laughter.

Those who only once heard the round of tunes emitted by this musical snuffbox went away amazed, and told such wonders of Dinah as made all the women jealous for ten leagues round.

There is an indescribable mental headiness in the admiration we inspire, or in the effect of playing a part, which fends off criticism from reaching the idol.

An atmosphere, produced perhaps by unceasing nervous tension, forms a sort of halo, through which the world below is seen.

In my opinion, promissory notes are so many cabbage-leaves. To live as we are living, we ought always to have a year’s income in hand and count on no more than two-thirds of our returns.”

Any form of resistance is enough to make a woman vow to subdue it; Dinah flung herself against a will of iron padded round with gentleness.

She tried to fill the little man’s soul with jealousy and alarms, but it was stockaded with insolent confidence. He left Dinah, when he went to Paris, with all the conviction of Médor in Angélique’s fidelity.

for she supposed him to be ambitious, after seeing him return thrice from Paris, each time a step higher on the social ladder.

But when she struck on the man’s heart, it was as though she had tapped on marble!

The man who had been Receiver-General and Referendary, who was now Master of Appeals, Officer of the Legion of Honor, and Royal Commissioner, was but a mole throwing up its little hills round and round a vineyard!

This remark points to one of the sores of modern society. It must be clearly understood: France in the nineteenth century is divided into two broad zones—Paris, and the provinces.

The provinces jealous of Paris; Paris never thinking of the provinces but to demand money.

Of old, Paris was the Capital of the provinces, and the Court ruled the Capital; now, all Paris is the Court, and all the country is the town.

It is the same with matters of speech, choice of words and ideas, as it is with matters of feeling.

The mind can rust as well as the body if it is not rubbed up in Paris; but the thing on which provincialism most sets its stamp is gesture, gait, and movement; these soon lose the briskness which Paris constantly keeps alive.

The provincial is used to walk and move in a world devoid of accident or change, there is nothing to be avoided;

And have you ever noticed the effect on human beings of a life in common?

By the ineffaceable instinct of simian mimicry they all tend to copy each other.

Each one, without knowing it, acquires the gestures, the tone of voice, the manner, the attitudes, the very countenance of others. In six years Dinah had sunk to the pitch of the society she lived in.

“What is it that ails you?” asked Monsieur de Clagny, seeing her so dejected.

“Anna,” said she, “has learned to live, while I have been learning to endure.”

A tragicomedy was, in fact, being enacted in Madame de la Baudraye’s house, in harmony with her struggles over money matters and her successive transformations—a drama to which no one but Monsieur de Clagny and the Abbé Duret ever knew the clue, when Dinah in …

“You will find such relief as those who write epitaphs or elegies over those whom they have lost.

Pain is soothed in the heart as lines surge up in the brain.

”

Reflection came too late; Dinah shuddered with shame at having made “copy” of some of her woes.

“Write no more,” said the Abbé Duret. “You will cease to be a woman; you will be a poet.”

Moulins, Nevers, Bourges were searched to find Jan Diaz; but Dinah was impenetrable. To remove any evil impression, in case any unforeseen chance should betray her name, she wrote a charming poem in two cantos on The Mass-Oak, a legend of the Nivernais:

Then, in and around Sancerre, Madame de la Baudraye became the rage; she was the future rival of George Sand. From Sancerre to Bourges a poem was praised which, at any other time, would certainly have been hooted.

The provincial public⁠—like every French public, perhaps⁠—does not share the love of the King of the French for the happy medium: it lifts you to the skies or drags you in the mud.

By this time the good Abbé, Madame de la Baudraye’s counselor, was dead; he would certainly have prevented her rushing into public life.

but women are not ready to believe in such force in weak natures, and hatred is too constantly in action not to be a vital force.

Dinah, finding her husband incapable of love, denied him the power to hate.

“Do not confound hatred and vengeance,” said the Abbé. “They are two different sentiments. One is the instinct of small minds; the other is the outcome of law which great souls obey. God is avenged, but He does not hate.

“Do not confound hatred and vengeance,” said the Abbé. “They are two different sentiments. One is the instinct of small minds; the other is the outcome of law which great souls obey. God is avenged, but He does not hate.

Hatred is a vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their meanness, and make it a pretext for sordid tyranny.

So beware of offending Monsieur de la Baudraye;

The household that was thus racked by domestic troubles was calm on the surface; here were two ill-assorted but resigned beings, and the indescribable propriety, the lie that society insists on, and which to Dinah was an unendurable yoke.

Why did she long to throw off the mask she had worn for twelve years?

Whence this weariness which, every day, increased her hope of finding herself a widow?

Utter despair or dull resignation—there is no third alternative; that is the arid soil in which our existence is rooted, and on which a thousand stagnant ideas fall; they cannot fertilize the ground, but they supply food for the etiolated flowers of our desert souls.

Never believe in indifference! Indifference is either despair or resignation.

Then each woman takes up the pursuit which, according to her character, seems to promise some amusement.

“

Conversation is bounded on the south by remarks on the intrigues lying hidden under the stagnant water of provincial life, on the north by proposed marriages, on the west by jealousies, and on the east by sour remarks.

“And so,” she went on, striking an attitude, “you see a woman wrinkled at nine-and-twenty, ten years before the time fixed by the rules of Doctor Bianchon, a woman whose skin is ruined at an early age, who turns as yellow as a quince when …

“But, madame,” said Lousteau, “you are proving that we are still in Paris. I shall steal this gem of description; it will be worth ten thousand francs to me in an article.”

“Oh, monsieur,” she retorted, “never trust provincial women.”

“And why not?” said Lousteau.

“That is true,” said Lousteau. “

There is in a country-bred woman’s heart a store of surprises, as in some toys.

”

“Well,” said Gatien to Lousteau, “what do you think of her?”

“I think that the clever woman of Sancerre is simply the greatest chatterbox,” replied the journalist.

“A woman who wants to see you deputy!” cried Gatien. “An angel!”

However, halfway through the evening, the Baroness was gracious to Lousteau again.

Have you never observed what great meanness may be committed for small ends?

Thus the haughty Dinah, who would not sacrifice herself for a fool, who in the depths of the country led such a wretched life of struggles, of suppressed rebellion, of unuttered poetry, who to get away from Lousteau had climbed the highest and steepest peak …

“For whom are you decorating that pretty basket, madame?” said Lousteau. “For some charity lottery, perhaps?”

“No,” she said, “I think there is too much display in charity done to the sound of a trumpet.”

“You are very indiscreet,” said Monsieur Gravier.

With this notion in his head, he was the first to go down and into the garden, hoping to meet his hostess. And this chance fell out all the more easily because Madame de la Baudraye on her part wished to converse with her critic.

Half such chances are planned.

“You were out shooting yesterday, monsieur,” said Madame de la Baudraye. “This morning I am rather puzzled as to how to find you any new amusement;

“You have sought pleasure,” said she, “but you have never loved.

Believe me, true love often comes late in life.

Remember Monsieur de Gentz, who fell in love in his old age with Fanny Ellsler, and left the Revolution of July to take its course while he attended the dancer’s rehearsals.”

“It seems to me unlikely,” replied Lousteau. “

I can still believe in love, but I have ceased to believe in woman.

There are in me, I suppose, certain defects which hinder me from being loved, for I have often been thrown over. Perhaps I have too strong a feeling for the ideal—like all men who have looked too closely into reality—”

but he was so much the doctor, that he was not even nettled at Dinah’s marked preference for the newspaper-rather than the prescription-writer! In fact, Dinah, herself famous, was naturally more alive to wit than to fame.

Love generally prefers contrast to similitude.

Everything was against the physician—his frankness, his simplicity, and his profession. And this is why: Women who want to love—and Dinah wanted to love as much as to be loved—have an instinctive aversion for men who are devoted to an absorbing occupation;

When the journalist and Madame de la Baudraye, side by side in the rickety old chaise, had recrossed the Loire, they both were unready to speak.

In these circumstances, the first words that break the silence are full of terrible meaning.

“Do you know how much I love you?” said the journalist point blank.

“Do you know how much I love you?” said the journalist point blank.

Victory might gratify Lousteau, but defeat could cause him no grief. This indifference was the secret of his audacity.

He took Madame de la Baudraye’s hand as he spoke these decisive words, and pressed it in both his; but Dinah gently released it.

This look seemed to crown Lousteau’s joy; his wit flowed more freely, and at last he made Madame de la Baudraye laugh.

When, under circumstances which so seriously compromise her pride, a woman has been made to laugh, she is finally committed.

As they drove in by the spacious graveled forecourt, with its lawn in the middle, and the large vases filled with flowers which so well set off the façade of Anzy, the journalist was saying:

“

When women love, they forgive everything, even our crimes; when they do not love, they cannot forgive anything⁠—not even our virtues.

—Do you forgive me,” he added in Madame de la Baudraye’s ear, and pressing her arm to his heart with tender emphasis. And Dinah could not help smiling.

“If that woman ever forgets me!” he would sometimes say to himself as they returned together from a long walk in the woods, “I will owe her no grudge—she will have found something better.”

When two beings have sung together all the duets of that enchanting score, and still love each other, it may be said that they love truly.

Lousteau, however, had not time to repeat himself, for he was to leave Anzy in the early days of November. His paper required his presence in Paris.

“

What will be the end of us? White hairs are giving us respectful hints!

”

Lousteau wrote to Dinah; but instead of writing from the heart, he was clever. The letter was all the more insidious; it was like one of Mirabeau’s letters to Sophie.

The style of a true lover is transparent.

It is a clear stream which allows the bottom of the heart to be seen between two banks, bright with the trifles of existence, and covered with the flowers of the soul that blossom afresh every day, full of intoxicating beauty—but only for two beings.

It is a clear stream which allows the bottom of the heart to be seen between two banks, bright with the trifles of existence, and covered with the flowers of the soul that blossom afresh every day, full of intoxicating beauty—but only for two beings.

As soon as a love letter has any charm for a third reader, it is beyond doubt the product of the head, not of the heart.

But a woman will always be beguiled; she always believes herself to be the determining cause of this flow of wit.

“

If you were to marry a lamb without spot, it might be a light woman by the end of two years.

What is the damage?—an anticipated dividend! It is quite the fashion.

“I love you for your own sake, that is all—and I can reason. Well! why do you stand there like a wax image of Abd-el-Kader? There is nothing to meditate over.

Marriage is heads or tails⁠—well, you have tossed heads up.

”

Economy covered every scrap of gilding with green gauze; all the furniture wore holland covers. Though it was impossible to feel a shade of uneasiness as to the wealth of the inhabitants, at the end of half an hour no one could suppress a yawn.

Boredom perched in every nook; the curtains hung dolefully; the dining-room was like Harpagon’s.

Even if Lousteau had not known all about Malaga, he could have guessed that the notary’s real life was spent elsewhere.

Lousteau, clever as he was, did not think it strange that the wife of a rich notary should wish to inspect a volume costing fifteen francs before deciding on the purchase.

Your clever man never condescends to study the middle-class, who escape his ken by this want of attention; and while he is making game of them, they are at leisure to throttle him.

So one day early in January 1837, Madame Cardot and her daughter took a hackney coach and went to the Rue des Martyrs to return the parts of Gil Blas to Félicie’s betrothed, both delighted at the thought of seeing Lousteau’s rooms.

“If you had kept a pot boiling for some actress who gave you your fun for it—well; that is what you may call a cabinet matter.

But to live with another man’s wife? It is a draft at sight on disaster; it is bolting the bitter pills of vice with none of the gilding.

”

And thus was the whole programme played out of a provincial amour, so satirically described by Lousteau to Madame de la Baudraye—a fact which neither he nor she remembered.

Passion is born a deaf-mute.

This winter in Paris was to Madame de la Baudraye all that the month of October had been at Sancerre. Étienne, to initiate “his wife” into Paris life, varied this honeymoon by evenings at the play, where Dinah would only go to the stage box.

they have not been a second time to the same secret haunts of the soul; they have not studied each other till they know, as they must later, the very thought, word, and gesture that responds to every event, the greatest and the smallest.

Enchantment reigns; there are no collisions, no differences of opinion, no cold looks. Their two souls are always on the same side.

And Dinah would speak the magical words, emphasized by the yet more magical expression and looks which every woman can use under such circumstances.

This reality of Paris life pierced Dinah’s heart like a thorn; she repented of having tempted Étienne into the extravagances of love.

It is so difficult to pass from pleasure to work, that happiness has wrecked more poems than sorrows ever helped to flow in sparkling jets.

Dinah, happy in seeing Étienne taking his ease, smoking a cigar after breakfast, his face beaming as he basked like a lizard in the sunshine, could not summon up courage enough to make herself the bum-bailiff of a magazine.

at the same time, there is no great talent without a strong will. These twin forces are requisite for the erection of the vast edifice of personal glory.

A distinguished genius keeps his brain in a productive condition, just as the knights of old kept their weapons always ready for battle.

They conquer indolence, they deny themselves enervating pleasures, or indulge only to a fixed limit proportioned to their powers.

This explains the life of such men as Walter Scott, Cuvier, Voltaire, Newton, Buffon, Bayle, Bossuet, Leibnitz, Lopez de Vega, Calderon, Boccacio, Aretino, Aristotle—in short, every man who delighted, governed, or led his contemporaries.

A man may and ought to pride himself more on his will than on his talent.

Though Talent has its germ in a cultivated gift, Will means the incessant conquest of his instincts, of proclivities subdued and mortified, and difficulties of every kind heroically defeated. The abuse of smoking encouraged Lousteau’s indolence.

Though Talent has its germ in a cultivated gift, Will means the incessant conquest of his instincts, of proclivities subdued and mortified, and difficulties of every kind heroically defeated. The abuse of smoking encouraged Lousteau’s indolence.

Tobacco, which can lull grief, inevitably numbs a man’s energy.

Then, while the cigar deteriorated him physically, criticism as a profession morally stultified a man so easily tempted by pleasure. Criticism is as fatal to the critic as seeing two sides to a question is to a pleader.

Then, while the cigar deteriorated him physically, criticism as a profession morally stultified a man so easily tempted by pleasure.

Criticism is as fatal to the critic as seeing two sides to a question is to a pleader.

In these professions the judgment is undermined, the mind loses its lucid rectitude. The writer lives by taking sides. Thus, we may distinguish two kinds of criticism, as in painting we may distinguish art from practical dexterity.

Each of the lovers has a separate home; they have both submitted to the world and saved appearances. Ellénore, repeatedly left to herself, is compelled to vast labors of affection to expel the thoughts of release which captivate Adolphe when absent.

The constant exchange of glances and thoughts in domestic life gives a woman such power that a man needs stronger reasons for desertion than she will ever give him so long as she loves him.

This was an entirely new phase both to Étienne and to Dinah. Dinah intended to be indispensable; she wanted to infuse fresh energy into this man, whose weakness smiled upon her, for she thought it a security.

“I will be a mother to him!” she had replied.

There are certain horrible situations in which we come to no decision till the moment when our friends discern our dishonor.

We accept compromises with ourself so long as we escape a censor who comes to play prosecutor. Monsieur de Clagny, as clumsy as a tortured man, had been torturing Dinah.

She restricted herself to urging that Dinah and Lousteau should live apart, not asking her to give him up.

In real life these violent situations are not closed as they are in books, by death or cleverly contrived catastrophes; they end far less poetically⁠—in disgust, in the blighting of every flower of the soul, in the commonplace of habit, and very often too in another passion, which robs a wife of the interest which is traditionally ascribed to women.

So, when common sense, the law of social proprieties, family interest—all the mixed elements which, since the Restoration, have been dignified by the mane of Public Morals, out of sheer aversion to the name of the Catholic religion—where this is seconded by a sense of …

“Never!” cried the new-made Countess, with an icy look. “Do you not comprehend that we are, after all, but finite creatures?

Our feelings seem infinite by reason of our anticipation of heaven, but here on earth they are limited by the strength of our physical being.

There are some feeble, mean natures which may receive an endless number of wounds and live on; but there are some more highly-tempered souls which snap at last under repeated blows. You have—”