Shorts from Scenes from Private Life quotes

There may be two perfectly dissimilar beings in one household. The wife of a shopkeeper is sometimes worthy of a prince, and the wife of a prince is often worthless compared with the wife of an artisan.

The social state has freaks which Nature does not allow herself; it is nature plus society.

The description of social species would thus be at least double that of animal species, merely in view of the two sexes. Then, among animals the drama is limited; there is scarcely any confusion; they turn and rend each other—that is all.

Though dazzled, so to speak, by Walter Scott’s amazing fertility, always himself and always original, I did not despair, for I found the source of his genius in the infinite variety of human nature.

Chance is the greatest romancer in the world; we have only to study it.

French society would be the real author; I should only be the secretary.

Chance is the greatest romancer in the world; we have only to study it.

French society would be the real author; I should only be the secretary.

By drawing up an inventory of vices and virtues, by collecting the chief facts of the passions, by depicting characters, by choosing the principal incidents of social life, by composing types out of a combination of homogeneous characteristics, I might perhaps succeed in writing the …

Socrates was immoral; Jesus Christ was immoral; they both were persecuted in the name of the society they overset or reformed.

When a man is to be killed he is taxed with immorality.

These tactics, familiar in party warfare, are a disgrace to those who use them. Luther and Calvin knew well what they were about when they shielded themselves behind damaged worldly interests! And they lived all the days of their life.

… describing truly the various phases of society which have successively existed in Scotland, perhaps the painter of Effie and Alice—the two figures for which he blamed himself in his later years—might have admitted passion with its sins and punishments, and the virtues revealed by repentance.

Passion is the sum-total of humanity. Without passion, religion, history, romance, art, would all be useless.

Some persons, seeing me collect such a mass of facts and paint them as they are, with passion for their motive power, have supposed, but wrongly, that I must belong to the school of Sensualism and Materialism—two aspects of the same thing—Pantheism.

An involuntary smile parted his lips each time he looked at the shop, where, in fact, there were some laughable details.

A formidable wooden beam, resting on four pillars, which appeared to have bent under the weight of the decrepit house, had been encrusted with as many coats of different paint as there are of rouge on an old duchess’ cheek.

In the middle of this broad and fantastically carved joist there was an old painting representing a cat playing rackets. This picture was what moved the young man to mirth.

The fire that flashed in his black eyes, gloomy and sparkling by turns, was in harmony with the singular outline of his features, with his wide, flexible mouth, hardened into a smile. His forehead, knit with violent annoyance, had a stamp of doom.

Is not the forehead the most prophetic feature of a man?

When the stranger’s brow expressed passion the furrows formed in it were terrible in their strength and energy;

said Monsieur Guillaume to his three neophytes. “In former days, bless you, when I was in Master Chevrel’s service, I should have overhauled more than two pieces of cloth by this time.”

“Then it was daylight earlier,” said the second assistant, whose duty this was.

The old shopkeeper could not help smiling.

On the other hand, the senior apprentice, with his long legs, his chestnut hair, his big hands and powerful frame, had found a secret admirer in Mademoiselle Virginie, who, in spite of her dower of fifty thousand crowns, had as yet no suitor.

Nothing could be more natural than these two passions at cross-purposes, born in the silence of the dingy shop, as violets bloom in the depths of a wood.

The mute and constant looks which made the young people’s eyes meet by sheer need of change in the midst of persistent work and cloistered peace, was sure, sooner or later, to give rise to feelings of love.

The mute and constant looks which made the young people’s eyes meet by sheer need of change in the midst of persistent work and cloistered peace, was sure, sooner or later, to give rise to feelings of love.

The habit of seeing always the same face leads insensibly to our reading there the qualities of the soul, and at last effaces all its defects.

“At the pace at which that man goes, our girls will soon have to go on their knees to a suitor!” said Monsieur Guillaume to himself, as he read the first decree by which Napoleon drew in advance on the conscript classes.

She herself felt a sort of rapture mingled with terror at thinking that her presence had brought happiness to him whose name was on every lip, and whose talent lent immortality to transient scenes.

She was loved! It was impossible to doubt it.

When she no longer saw the artist, these simple words still echoed in her ear, “You see how love has inspired me!”

What ravages must such a vision make in the heart of a girl brought up among such a family! What hopes must it raise in a young creature who, in the midst of sordid elements, had pined for a life of elegance!

A sunbeam had fallen into the prison. Augustine was suddenly in love.

So many of her feelings were soothed that she succumbed without reflection. At eighteen does not love hold a prism between the world and the eyes of a young girl?

A sunbeam had fallen into the prison. Augustine was suddenly in love. So many of her feelings were soothed that she succumbed without reflection.

At eighteen does not love hold a prism between the world and the eyes of a young girl?

She was incapable of suspecting the hard facts which result from the union of a loving woman with a man of imagination, and she believed herself called to make him happy, not seeing any disparity between herself and him.

“So you like drapery!” cried old Guillaume. “Well, then, by Gad! shake hands on that, my young friend. Since you can respect trade, we shall understand each other. And why should it be despised?

The world began with trade, since Adam sold Paradise for an apple. He did not strike a good bargain though!

” And the old man roared with honest laughter, encouraged by the champagne, which he sent round with a liberal hand. The band that covered the young artist’s eyes was so thick that he thought his future parents amiable.

“My dear child, you shall marry your Sommervieux since you insist; you may, if you like, risk your capital in happiness. But I am not going to be hoodwinked by the thirty thousand francs to be made by spoiling good canvas.

Money that is lightly earned is lightly spent.

Did I not hear that harebrained youngster declare this evening that money was made round that it might roll. If it is round for spendthrifts, it is flat for saving folks who pile it up.

Money that is lightly earned is lightly spent. Did I not hear that harebrained youngster declare this evening that money was made round that it might roll.

If it is round for spendthrifts, it is flat for saving folks who pile it up.

Now, my child, that fine gentleman talks of giving you carriages and diamonds! He has money, let him spend it on you; so be it. It is no concern of mine.

When the painter showed his wife the sketches for his finest compositions he heard her exclaim, as her father had done, “How pretty!” This tepid admiration was not the outcome of conscientious feeling, but of her faith on the strength of love.

Augustine cared more for a look than for the finest picture. The only sublime she knew was that of the heart.

At last Thédore could not resist the evidence of the cruel fact—his wife was insensible to poetry, she did not dwell in his sphere, she could not follow him in all his vagaries, his inventions, his joys and his sorrows;

Thus Augustine came among this sparkling set in a spirit of distrust which no one could fail to see. She was a restraint on their freedom.

Now an artist who feels restraint is pitiless; he stays away, or laughs it to scorn.

Madame Guillaume, among other absurdities, had an excessive notion of the dignity she considered the prerogative of a married woman; and Augustine, though she had often made fun of it, could not help a slight imitation of her mother’s primness.

and even if they had been more severe, these pleasantries were after all only reprisals from his friends. Still, nothing could seem a trifle to a spirit so open as Thédore’s to impressions from without. A coldness insensibly crept over him, and inevitably spread.

To attain conjugal happiness we must climb a hill whose summit is a narrow ridge, close to a steep and slippery descent: the painter’s love was falling down it.

He regarded his wife as incapable of appreciating the moral considerations which justified him in his own eyes for his singular behavior to her, and believed himself quite innocent in hiding from her thoughts she could not enter into, and peccadilloes outside the jurisdiction of …

A sinister flash showed her the breaches which, as a result of her sordid education, hindered the perfect union of her soul with Théodore’s; she loved him well enough to absolve him and condemn herself.

She shed tears of blood, and perceived, too late, that there are mésalliances of the spirit as well as of rank and habits.

As she recalled the early raptures of their union, she understood the full extent of that lost happiness, and accepted the conclusion that so rich a harvest of love was in itself a whole life, which only sorrow could pay for.

At the same time, she loved too truly to lose all hope. At one-and-twenty she dared undertake to educate herself, and make her imagination, at least, worthy of that she admired.

“If I am not a poet,” thought she, “at any rate, I will understand poetry.”

Then, with all the strength of will, all the energy which every woman can display when she loves, Madame de Sommervieux tried to alter her character, her manners, and her habits;

“

Very well, then let men of genius stop at home and not get married.

What! A man of genius is to make his wife miserable? And because he is a genius it is all right! Genius, genius!

She had learned that a wife must hide from everyone, even from her parents, woes for which it is so difficult to find sympathy. The storms and sufferings of the upper spheres are appreciated only by the lofty spirits who inhabit there.

In any circumstance we can only be judged by our equals.

Thus poor Augustine found herself thrown back on the horror of her meditations, in the cold atmosphere of her home. Study was indifferent to her, since study had not brought her back her husband’s heart.

He will end by compromising me. I know the world too well, my dear, to abandon myself to the discretion of a too superior man. You should know that one may allow them to court one, but marry them—that is a mistake!

We women ought to admire men of genius, and delight in them as a spectacle, but as to living with them? Never.

—No, no. It is like wanting to find pleasure in inspecting the machinery of the opera instead of sitting in a box to enjoy its brilliant illusions. But this misfortune has fallen on you, my poor child, has it not?

You should know that one may allow them to court one, but marry them—that is a mistake! We women ought to admire men of genius, and delight in them as a spectacle, but as to living with them? Never.—No, no.

It is like wanting to find pleasure in inspecting the machinery of the opera instead of sitting in a box to enjoy its brilliant illusions.

But this misfortune has fallen on you, my poor child, has it not? Well, then, you must try to arm yourself against tyranny.”

“Well, come and see me sometimes, and it will not be long before you have mastered the knowledge of these trifles, important, too, in their way.

Outward things are, to fools, half of life; and in that matter more than one clever man is a fool, in spite of all his talent.

But I dare wager you never could refuse your Thédore anything!”

“Poor innocent, I could adore you for your simplicity. You should know that the more we love the less we should allow a man, above all, a husband, to see the whole extent of our passion.

The one who loves most is tyrannized over, and, which is worse, is sooner or later neglected.

The one who wishes to rule should—”

Augustine was like an Alpine cowherd surprised by an avalanche; if he hesitates, if he listens to the shouts of his comrades, he is almost certainly lost.

In such a crisis the heart steels itself or breaks.

Madame de Sommervieux returned home a prey to such agitation as it is difficult to describe. Her conversation with the Duchesse de Carigliano had roused in her mind a crowd of contradictory thoughts.

After having escaped all the dangers which threatened the royalist leaders during this stormy period of modern history, he was wont to say in jest,

“I am one of the men who gave themselves to be killed on the steps of the throne.”

And the pleasantry had some truth in it, as spoken by a man left for dead at the bloody battle of Les Quatre Chemins. Though ruined by confiscation, the staunch Vendéen steadily refused the lucrative posts offered to him by the Emperor Napoleon.

Notwithstanding this ovation, none of these august persons thought of inquiring as to the sum of his losses, or of the money he had poured so generously into the chests of the Catholic regiments.

He discovered, a little late, that he had made war at his own cost.

Towards the end of the evening he thought he might venture on a witty allusion to the state of his affairs, similar, as it was, to that of many other gentlemen. His Majesty laughed heartily enough;

“My friend Fontaine, I shall take care never to appoint you to be director-general, or minister. Neither you nor I, as employees, could keep our place on account of our opinions.

Representative government has this advantage; it saves Us the trouble We used to have, of dismissing Our Secretaries of State.

Our Council is a perfect inn-parlor, whither public opinion sometimes sends strange travelers; however, We can always find a place for Our faithful adherents.”

From that day his intercourse with Monsieur de Fontaine showed less amenity.

Kings enjoy contradicting more than people think.

Like most youngest children, Emilie de Fontaine was a Benjamin spoilt by almost everybody. The King’s coolness, therefore, caused the Count all the more regret, because no marriage was ever so difficult to arrange as that of this darling daughter.

Thus, accustomed by degrees to the enjoyment of money, elegance of dress, of gilded drawing-rooms and fine carriages, became as necessary to her as the compliments of flattery, sincere or false, and the festivities and vanities of court life.

Like most spoiled children, she tyrannized over those who loved her, and kept her blandishments for those who were indifferent.

Her faults grew with her growth, and her parents were to gather the bitter fruits of this disastrous education.

Her beauty was so remarkable that, for her, to appear in a room was to be its queen; but, like sovereigns, she had no friends, though she was everywhere the object of attentions to which a finer nature than hers might perhaps have succumbed.

Not a man, not even an old man, had it in him to contradict the opinions of a young girl whose lightest look could rekindle love in the coldest heart.

She had been educated with a care which her sisters had not enjoyed; painted pretty well, spoke Italian and English, and played the piano brilliantly; her voice, trained by the best masters, had a ring in it which made her singing irresistibly charming.

A father’s eyes are slow to be unsealed, and it needed more than one experience before the old Royalist perceived that his daughter’s rare caresses were bestowed on him with an air of condescension.

She was like young children, who seem to say to their mother, “Make haste to kiss me, that I may go to play.”

In short, Emilie vouchsafed to be fond of her parents. But often, by those sudden whims, which seem inexplicable in young girls, she kept aloof and scarcely ever appeared; she complained of having to share her father’s and mother’s heart with too many people;

Mademoiselle de Fontaine had an ideal standard which was to be the model. A young man who at the first glance did not fulfil the requisite conditions did not even get a second look.

“Good Heavens! see how fat he is!” was with her the utmost expression of contempt.

To hear her, people of respectable corpulence were incapable of sentiment, bad husbands, and unfit for civilized society. Though it is esteemed a beauty in the East, to be fat seemed to her a misfortune for a woman;

To hear her, people of respectable corpulence were incapable of sentiment, bad husbands, and unfit for civilized society.

Though it is esteemed a beauty in the East, to be fat seemed to her a misfortune for a woman; but in a man it was a crime.

These paradoxical views were amusing, thanks to a certain liveliness of rhetoric.

“My dear, do not so depreciate those who love you.

Only the poor are generous as a rule; the rich have always excellent reasons for not handing over twenty thousand francs to a relation.

Come, my child, do not pout, let us talk rationally.—Among the young marrying men have you noticed Monsieur de Manerville?”

“What can you say against Monsieur de Rastignac?”

“Madame de Nucingen has made a banker of him,” she said with meaning.

“And our cousin, the Vicomte de Portenduère?”

The old man’s pleasantry was received with general laughter.

“Take care I don’t marry you, old fool!”

replied the young girl, whose last words were happily drowned in the noise.

And a good many bourgeois marriages have had their beginning to the sound of the band occupying the centre of this circular ballroom.

If that roof could speak, what love-stories could it not tell!

This interesting medley gave the Sceaux balls at that time a spice of more amusement than those of two or three places of the same kind near Paris; and it had incontestable advantages in its rotunda, and the beauty of its situation and its gardens.

The young man went up the bankside as he heard the sarcasm; then he crossed his arms, and said in an excited tone of voice, “I cannot suppose, monsieur, as I look at your white hairs, that you still amuse yourself by provoking duels—”

“White hairs!” cried the sailor, interrupting him. “You lie in your throat. They are only gray.”

A quarrel thus begun had in a few seconds become so fierce that the younger man forgot the moderation he had tried to preserve.

“Why do you think he is anything so common, my dear uncle? He seems to me to have very fine manners.”

“Everyone has manners nowadays, my dear.”

“No, uncle, not everyone has the air and style which come of the habit of frequenting drawing-rooms, and I am ready to lay a bet with you that the young man is of noble birth.”

Well, manners have changed. All these notions of lawful order, Kantism, and liberty have spoilt the young men. You have no Guimard now, no Duthé, no creditors—and you know nothing of heraldry; why, my dear young friend, you are not fully fledged.

The man who does not sow his wild oats in the spring sows them in the winter.

If I have but eighty thousand francs a year at the age of seventy, it is because I ran through the capital at thirty. Oh! with my wife—in decency and honor. However, your imperfections will not interfere with my introducing you at the Pavillon Planat.

A sarcastic remark of her uncle’s suddenly roused her from her apathy; she said, somewhat epigrammatically, that such heavenly perfection must cover some great defect, and that she would take good care how she judged so gifted a man at first sight.

“Those who please everybody, please nobody,” she added; “and the worst of all faults is to have none.”

Like all girls who are in love, Emilie cherished the hope of being able to hide her feelings at the bottom of her heart by putting the Argus-eyes that watched on the wrong tack;

“

Pooh! pooh! happy those whose fathers were hanged!

” cried the admiral gaily.

Their eyes met and flashed implacable looks. Each hoped to inflict a cruel wound on the heart of a lover.

In one instant they were as far apart as if one had been in China and the other in Greenland.

Does not the breath of vanity wither everything? Mademoiselle de Fontaine, a prey to the most violent struggle that can torture the heart of a young girl, reaped the richest harvest of anguish that prejudice and narrow-mindedness ever sowed in a human soul.

Their eyes met and flashed implacable looks. Each hoped to inflict a cruel wound on the heart of a lover. In one instant they were as far apart as if one had been in China and the other in Greenland.

Does not the breath of vanity wither everything?

Mademoiselle de Fontaine, a prey to the most violent struggle that can torture the heart of a young girl, reaped the richest harvest of anguish that prejudice and narrow-mindedness ever sowed in a human soul.

“Oh, madame, let us understand each other.

She would follow him to a desert and live in a tent but not to sit in a shop.

”

“No,” he replied. “

There are wounds which never heal.

”

the flesh lives, eyes move, blood flows in their veins, and stuffs have a changing sheen. Imagination helps the realism of every detail, and only sees the beauties of the work. At that hour illusion reigns despotically; perhaps it wakes at nightfall!

Is not illusion a sort of night to the mind, which we people with dreams?

Illusion then unfolds its wings, it bears the soul aloft to the world of fancies, a world full of voluptuous imaginings, where the artist forgets the real world, yesterday and the morrow, the future—everything down to its miseries, the good and the evil alike.

In the middle of the room Hippolyte remarked a card-table ready for play, with new packs of cards.

For an observer there was something heartrending in the sight of this misery painted up like an old woman who wants to falsify her face.

At such a sight every man of sense must at once have stated to himself this obvious dilemma—either these two women are honesty itself, or they live by intrigue and gambling.

this was to him life so rich that such sensations, too greatly prolonged, would have worn out his spirit.

The heart has the singular power of giving extraordinary value to mere nothings.

What joy it is to a traveler to treasure a blade of grass, an unfamiliar leaf, if he has risked his life to pluck it! It is the same with the trifles of love.

At the same time the wretched rooms rose before him, denuded of the poetry of love which beautifies everything; he saw them dirty and faded, regarding them as emblematic of an inner life devoid of honor, idle and vicious.

Are not our feelings written, as it were, on the things about us?

Next morning he rose, not having slept. The heartache, that terrible malady of the soul, had made rapid inroads.

The idea of this mission pleased him.

Love makes a gain of everything.

Nothing tempts a young man more than to play the part of a good genius to a woman. There is something inexplicably romantic in such an enterprise which appeals to a highly-strung soul.

A common feeling, other than love, united these two beings, and a common thought animated their thoughts and their actions.

Misery is perhaps the strongest of all bonds.

The man had one of those broad, solemn-looking heads, with a mass of hair, of which so many examples have been perpetuated by the Carracci. Among the thick black locks were many white hairs.

All the girls turned to look at their imprudent companion, who was tottering. The fear of seeing them gather round her gave her courage; she recovered her strength and her balance, and dancing on the chair, she turned to Laure, and said with some agitation:

“Bah! It is at any rate safer than a throne!”

She quickly arranged the baize, came down, pushed the table and the chair far from the partition, returned to her easel, and made a few more attempts, seeming to try for an effect of light that suited her.

Nothing is more mortifying to young girls, or indeed to anyone, than to see a practical joke, an insult, or a witticism fail of its effect in consequence of the victim’s contempt.

It would seem that our hatred of an enemy is increased by the height to which he can rise above us.

Ginevra’s conduct remained a riddle to all her companions. Her friends and her foes were alike surprised, for she was allowed to have every good quality excepting forgiveness of injuries.

Ginevra’s regard for Louis, and his for her, thus made greater progress in a month than a fashionable friendship can make in ten years in a drawing-room.

Is not adversity the touchstone of character?

Hence Ginevra could really appreciate Louis, and know him, and they soon felt a reciprocal esteem.

Like lovers, they would all three sit silent for hours, hearing, better than in words, the eloquence of each other’s soul. This deep feeling, the very life of the two old people, filled all their thoughts.

Not three lives were here, but one, which, like the flame on a hearth, burned up in three tongues of fire.

Though now and then memories of Napoleon’s bounty and misfortunes, or the politics of the day, took the place of their constant preoccupation, they could talk of them without breaking their community of thought. For did not Ginevra share their political passions?

In the evening she played and sang for a long time, and exclaimed now and then, “This nocturne requires a man’s voice!”

She was an Italian, and that says everything.

A week later her mother beckoned her; Ginevra went, and then in her ear she whispered, “I have persuaded your father to receive him.”

Piombo seemed to be a prey to anguish too keen, too concentrated to be shown by ordinary means of expression. The servants waited on a meal which no one ate.

A horror of food is one of the symptoms indicative of a great crisis of the soul.

All three rose without any one of them having spoken a word. When Ginevra was seated in the great, solemn drawing-room, between her father and mother, Piombo tried to speak, but he found no voice; he tried to walk about, but found no strength;

“You must choose between him and us.

Our Vendetta is part of ourselves. If you do not espouse my cause, you are not of my family.

”

The old man deeply felt this tacit insult, and at that moment gathered the bitter fruits of the education he had given his daughter.

Respect is a barrier which protects the parents and the children alike, sparing those much sorrow, and these remorse.

The next day, as Ginevra was going out at the hour when she usually went to the studio, she found the door of the house closed upon her; but she soon devised means for informing Luigi Porta of her father’s severity.

“Mercy, then, mercy!” said she. “

You hesitate to kill me, but you refuse me life.

Oh, father, I never loved you so well—but give me Luigi. I ask your consent on my knees; a daughter may humble herself to her father. My Luigi, or I must die!”

“Luigi!” cried Ginevra, as she went into the humble room where the officer was lodged, “my Luigi, we have no fortune but our love.”

“We are richer than all the kings of the earth,” he replied.

“My father and mother have cast me out,” said she with deep melancholy.

they bowed respectfully, and she bowed in return; they looked at her in silence, and could only admire her.

Joy can only express itself among equals.

So, as fate would have it, all was gloomy and serious around the lovers; there was nothing to reflect their happiness.

All the joys of which these loud and gorgeous groups made a display, Luigi and Ginevra kept buried at the bottom of their hearts.

On one side was the coarse clamor of pleasure; on the other the delicate silence of happy souls: earth and heaven.

But Ginevra trembled, and could not altogether shake off her woman’s weakness. Superstitious, as Italians are, she regarded this contrast as an omen, and in the depths of her heart she harbored a feeling of dread, as unconquerable as her love itself.

The Maire had a stem, disapproving look, and his clerk stared at the couple with ill-natured curiosity. Nothing ever had less the appearance of a festivity.

Like all the other events of human life when they are stripped of their accessories, it was a simple thing in itself, immense in its idea.

After some questions, to which they replied, the Maire muttered a few words, and then, having signed their names in the register, Luigi and Ginevra were man and wife.

They were buried in this huge house, lost in the immensity of Paris, like two pearls in their shell, in the bosom of the deep sea.

For anyone else it would have been a prison; to them it was Paradise.

The first days of their married life were given to love; it was too difficult for them to devote themselves at once to work, and they could not resist the fascination of their mutual passion.

This was love in all its fresh candor, with its endless prattle, its unfinished sentences, its long silences, its Oriental restfulness and ardor. Luigi and Ginevra had wholly understood love.

Is not love like the sea, which, seen superficially or in haste, is accused of monotony by vulgar minds, while certain privileged beings can spend all their life admiring it and finding in it changeful phenomena which delight them?

One day, however, prudence dragged the young couple from their Garden of Eden; they must work for their living. Ginevra, who had a remarkable talent for copying pictures, set to work to produce copies, and formed a connection among dealers.

They spent another year in the midst of comfort.

The history of their life can be told in these words: “They were happy.” No event occurred deserving to be related.

At the beginning of the winter of 1819 the picture-dealers advised Ginevra to bring them something else than copies, as, in consequence of the great competition, they could no longer sell them to advantage.

there was nothing appalling in her voice; she did not bring despair with her, nor spectres, nor squalor, but she made them forget the traditions and the habit of comfort; she broke the mainsprings of pride.

Then came misery in all its horror, reckless of her rags, and trampling every human feeling under foot.

Seven or eight months after the birth of little Bartolomeo it would have been difficult to recognize the original of the beautiful portrait, the sole adornment of their bare room, in the mother who was suckling a sickly baby.

“Madame Firmiani?” says he. “Yes, yes, I know her very well. I go to her evenings. She receives on Wednesdays; a very good house to know.”

Madame Firmiani is always metamorphosed into a house.

The house is not a mere mass of stones architecturally put together; no, this word, in the language of the lounger, has no equivalent.

They are miserable at other people’s enjoyment, can forgive nothing but vice, wrongdoing, and infirmities, and want nothing but protégés.

Aristocrats by taste, they are republicans out of spite, simply to discover many inferiors among their equals.

“Oh, Madame Firmiani, my dear fellow, is one of those adorable women whom Nature feels to be a sufficient excuse for all the ugly ones she has created by mistake; she is bewitching, she is kind!

“Madame Firmiani? Was she not a singer at the Italian opera house?”—A man of the genus Simpleton. The individuals of this genus must have an answer to everything.

They would rather speak calumnies than be silent.

Two old Ladies (the wives of retired lawyers).—The First (she has a cap with bows of ribbon, her face is wrinkled, her nose sharp, she holds a prayerbook, and her voice is harsh).—“What was her maiden name?—this Madame Firmiani?”

The Second (she has a little red face like a lady-apple, and a gentle voice).—“She was a Cadignan, my dear, niece of the old Prince de Cadignan, and cousin, consequently, to the Due de Maufrigneuse.”

Madame Firmiani then is a Cadignan. Bereft of virtues, fortune, and youth, she would still be a Cadignan; that, like a prejudice, is always rich and living.

An Eccentric—“My dear fellow, I never saw any clogs in her anteroom; you may go to her house without compromising yourself, and play there without hesitation; for if there should be any rogues, they will be people of quality, consequently there is no quarreling.”

This speaker you recognize: he is one of the Envious, and we will not sketch his least feature. The species is as well-known as that of the domestic felis.

How is the perpetuity of envy to be explained? A vice which is wholly unprofitable!

People of fashion, literary people, very good people, and people of every kind were, in the month of January 1824, giving out so many different opinions on Madame Firmiani that it would be tiresome to report them all.

in fact, there were as many Mesdames Firmiani as there are varieties in social life, or sects in the Catholic Church.

Frightful thought! We are all like lithographed plates, of which an endless number of copies are taken off by slander.

These copies resemble or differ from the original by touches so imperceptibly slight that, but for the calumnies of our friends and the witticisms of newspapers, reputation would depend on the balance struck by each hearer between the limping truth and the lies to which …

Hence the remarks with which this story opened were necessary to mark the contrast between the real Firmiani and the Firmiani known to the world.

Though some women forgave her for being happy, others could not overlook her respectability; now there is nothing so terrible, especially in Paris, as suspicion without foundation; it is impossible to kill it.

This sketch of a personality so admirable by nature can only give a feeble idea of it;

“My sweet niece, we made love when I was young,” said the uncle, “but now you love.

You women are all that is good and lovely in humanity, for you are never guilty of your faults; they always originate with us.

”

To these two nothing seemed impossible. In such magic moments, when enjoyment sheds its reflections on the future, the soul foresees nothing but happiness. This sweet day had created memories for these two to which nothing could be compared in all their past existence.

Would the source prove to be more beautiful than the river, the desire more enchanting than its gratification, the thing hoped for more delightful than the thing possessed?

“So the day is already at an end!” On hearing this exclamation from her unknown friend when the dance was over, Caroline looked at him compassionately, as his face assumed once more a faint shade of sadness.

“So the day is already at an end!” On hearing this exclamation from her unknown friend when the dance was over, Caroline looked at him compassionately, as his face assumed once more a faint shade of sadness.

“Why should you not be as happy in Paris as you are here?” she asked. “Is happiness to be found only at Saint-Leu? It seems to me that I can henceforth never be unhappy anywhere.”

Roger was struck by these words, spoken with the glad unrestraint that always carries a woman further than she intended, just as prudery often lends her greater cruelty than she feels.

… by his wife, was too heavy, and the very dark green velvet used to cover the benches added to the gloom of this entrance—not, to be sure, an important room, but giving a first impression—just as we measure a man’s intelligence by his first address.

An anteroom is a kind of preface which announces what is to follow, but promises nothing.

The young husband wondered whether his wife could really have chosen the lamp of an antique pattern, which hung in the centre of this bare hall, the pavement of black and white marble, and the paper in imitation of blocks of stone, with green moss …

and the Greek helmets, the Roman crossed daggers, and the shields so dear to military enthusiasm that they were introduced on furniture of the most peaceful uses, had no fitness side by side with the delicate and profuse arabesques that delighted Madame de Pompadour.

Bigotry tends to an indescribably tiresome kind of humility which does not exclude pride.

Whether from modesty or by choice, Madame de Granville seemed to have a horror of light and cheerful colors; perhaps, too, she imagined that brown and purple beseemed the dignity of a magistrate.

“Why, it is my duty to love you,” said Angélique mildly, “and I can have no more delightful duty to carry out.”

Nature has implanted in the heart of woman so great a desire to please, so deep a craving for love, that, even in a youthful bigot, the ideas of salvation and a future existence must give way to the happiness of early married life.

And, in fact, from the month of April, when they were married, till the beginning of winter, the husband and wife lived in perfect union. Love and hard work have the grace of making a man tolerably indifferent to external matters.

And, in short, at the early stage of a union to which a man has been led by a young girl’s beauty, he can hardly be exacting as to his amusements.

Youth is greedy rather than dainty, and possession has a charm in itself.

How should he be keen to note coldness, dignity, and reserve in the woman to whom he ascribes the excitement he himself feels, and lends the glow of the fire that burns within him?

How should he be keen to note coldness, dignity, and reserve in the woman to whom he ascribes the excitement he himself feels, and lends the glow of the fire that burns within him?

He must have attained a certain conjugal calm before he discovers that a bigot sits waiting for love with her arms folded.

Granville, therefore, believed himself happy till a fatal event brought its influence to bear on his married life.

Is it not an offence to the weakest creature that can think at all to be compelled to do, by the will of another, anything that he would otherwise have done simply of his own accord?

Of all forms of tyranny, the most odious is that which constantly robs the soul of the merit of its thoughts and deeds.

It has to abdicate without having reigned. The word we are readiest to speak, the feelings we most love to express, die when we are commanded to utter them.

Of all forms of tyranny, the most odious is that which constantly robs the soul of the merit of its thoughts and deeds. It has to abdicate without having reigned.

The word we are readiest to speak, the feelings we most love to express, die when we are commanded to utter them.

Ere long the young man ceased to invite his friends, to give parties or dinners; the house might have been shrouded in crape. A house where the mistress is a bigot has an atmosphere of its own.

Was this change wrought by the ascetic habits of a pharisaism which is not piety any more than avarice is economy? It would be hard to say.

Beauty without expression is perhaps an imposture.

This imperturbable set smile that the young wife always wore when she looked at Granville seemed to be a sort of Jesuitical formula of happiness, by which she thought to satisfy all the requirements of married life.

but nothing can counteract false ideas of religion. An eternity of happiness to be won, set in the scale against worldly enjoyment, triumphs over everything and makes every pang endurable.

Is it not the apotheosis of egotism, of Self beyond the grave?

Thus even the Pope was censured at the tribunal of the priest and the young devotee. To be always in the right is a feeling which absorbs every other in these tyrannous souls.

if a material of bad color or hideous design were to be found, she would select it. These hapless bigots are heartbreaking in their notions of dress.

Want of taste is a defect inseparable from false pietism.

And so, in the home-life that needs the fullest sympathy, Granville had no true companionship. He went out alone to parties and the theatres. Nothing in his house appealed to him.

Nothing in his house appealed to him. A huge Crucifix that hung between his bed and Angélique’s seemed figurative of his destiny. Does it not represent a murdered Divinity, a Man-God, done to death in all the prime of life and beauty?

The ivory of that cross was less cold than Angélique crucifying her husband under the plea of virtue.

This it was that lay at the root of their woes; the young wife saw nothing but duty where she should have given love.

“To win Heaven, my dear.

A woman cannot be at the same time the wife of a man and the spouse of Christ.

That would be bigamy; she must choose between a husband and a nunnery.

and I look for gratitude from none. I should see you die without blinking; and I beg of you to feel the same with regard to me.

I tell you, young man, the events of life have swept over my heart like the lavas of Vesuvius over Herculaneum.

The town is there—dead.”

Hearts were as nomadic as the regiments.

Between the first and fifth bulletins from the Grand Armée a woman might be in succession mistress, wife, mother, and widow.

Was it the prospect of early widowhood, the hope of a jointure, or that of bearing a name promised to history, which made the soldiers so attractive?

… which gave every treaty concluded between Napoleon and the rest of Europe the character of an armistice, left every passion open to a termination as sudden as the decisions of the Commander-in-chief of all these busbys, pelisses, and aiguillettes, which so fascinated the fair sex.

Hearts were as nomadic as the regiments.

Between the first and fifth bulletins from the Grand Armée a woman might be in succession mistress, wife, mother, and widow.

and at this moment she perceived her mistake, as injurious to her reputation as to her good opinion of herself. In her, as in other women of that time, the suddenness of their passions increased their vehemence.

Souls which love much and love often, suffer no less than those which burn themselves out in one affection.

Her liking for Martial was but of yesterday, it is true, but the least experienced surgeon knows that the pain caused by the amputation of a healthy limb is more acute than the removal of a diseased one.

for in comparison with a lover’s quarrel every interest pales, even with an old woman. To engage battle, Madame de Lansac shot at the younger lady a sardonic glance which made the Countess fear lest her fate was in the dowager’s hands.

There are looks between woman and woman which are like the torches brought on at the climax of a tragedy.

No one who had not known that Duchess could appreciate the terror which the expression of her countenance inspired in the Countess.

Her clemency enraptured Soulanges all the more, because this scene followed on the misery he had endured at the ball. He seized his wife’s hand and kissed it gratefully.

Is not gratitude often a part of love?

“Hortense, what is that on your finger that has hurt my lip so much?” asked he, laughing.

People affected to regard the Poles as allies of the Republican party, forgetting that Poland was an aristocratic republic. Thenceforth the party of wealth poured ignoble contempt on the Pole, who had been deified but a few days since.

The wind of a riot has always blown the Parisians round from north to south under every form of government.

This weathercock temper of Paris opinion must be remembered if we would understand how, in 1835, the name of Pole was a word of ridicule among the race who believe themselves to be the wittiest and politest in the world, and its central luminary, in …

still, he does not often find a young fellow who is his superior among men of fashion. These young men nowadays talk far too much of horses, income, taxes, and deputies, for French conversation to be what once it was.

Wit needs leisure, and certain inequalities of position.

Conversation is better perhaps at Petersburg and at Vienna than it is in Paris. Equals need no subtleties; they tell each other everything straight out, just as it is.

“Yes, indeed, my darling,” said he. “Friendship knows nothing of the bankruptcy of sentiment, the insolvency of pleasures.

Love, after giving more than it has, ends by giving less than it receives.

”

How, during these five months, should the Countess ever have seen the Captain? He hid from her, concealing the care he took to keep out of her way.

Nothing is so near divine love as a hopeless love.

Must not a man have some depth of soul thus to devote himself in silence and obscurity?

She eats little, to attract the eye by her slender shape; she cheats the hunger that attacks her during the evening with debilitating cups of tea, sweet cakes, heating ices, or heavy slices of pastry.

The stomach must submit to the commands of vanity.

She awakes late, and thus everything is in contradiction to the laws of Nature, and Nature is ruthless.

Six months spent in the country are barely enough to heal the wounds inflicted by the winter. We hear nothing talked of but dyspepsia and strange maladies, unknown to women who devote themselves to their household.

Formerly a woman was sometimes seen; now she is perpetually on the stage.

Clémentine had to fight her way; she was beginning to be quoted, and amid the cares of this struggle between her and her rivals there was hardly a place for love of her husband! Thaddeus might well be forgotten.

Paz was great only through his feelings, and there could rise to the sublime; but in the sphere of sentiment, being a man of action rather than of ideas, he kept his thoughts to himself. His thoughts, then, did nothing but eat his heart out.

And what, after all, is an unuttered thought?

At Clémentine’s speech the Marquis de Ronquerolles and his sister exchanged glances, with a side look at their niece, Count Adam, and Paz. It was one of those swift dramas which are played only in Italy or in Paris.

Alas! most Parisian women, keen-eyed and subtle as they are supposed to be, pass by—and always will pass by—such an one as Paz without observing him. Yes, more than one Paz remains misunderstood; but, fearful thought! some are misunderstood even when they are loved.

The simplest woman in the world requires some little coxcombry in the greatest man; and the most heroic love counts for nothing if it is uncut; it needs the arts of the polisher and the jeweler.

In the month of January 1842 Countess Laginski, beautified by gentle melancholy, inspired a mad passion in the Comte de la Palférine, one of the most audacious bucks of Paris at this day.

“He has not left Paris!” she exclaimed, recognizing Thaddeus, who ran off when he saw the carriage drive away with the Countess.

Had ever another woman such a romance in her life?

Clémentine is always hoping to see Paz again.

You feel there is a soul under this ill-defined personality. When she is interested in the conversation, she reveals the grace that lies buried under the prudery of cold demeanor, and then she is charming. She does not crave for success, and she gets it.

We always find the thing we do not seek.

This statement is too often true not to become a proverb one day. It will be the moral of this tale, which I should not allow myself to relate if it were not at this moment the talk of every drawing-room in Paris.

Inde amor, inde Burgunatis. We quake as we see the charred pieces coming down like an avalanche when we had balanced them so industriously between two blazing logs.

Oh! making up a wood-fire when you are in love is the material expression of your sentiments.

It was at this moment that I entered Eugène’s room; he started violently, and said:

Oh! forgive the Marquis.

A husband, however admirable, scarcely ever attains to perfection.

Rastignac as he went upstairs discerned the ten fallacies in worldly logic which stood on this page of the fair book of his life.

this stronghold too?” and he settled his head in his cravat.

Though young men are not very avaricious, they all love to add a head to their collection of medals.

Monsieur de Listomère seized on the Gazette de France, which he saw in a corner by the fireplace, and went to the window to form, by the help of the newspaper, an opinion of his own as to the state of France.

Eugène reddened. A man must be more than five-and-twenty not to redden when he is blamed for the stupid fidelity which women laugh at only to avoid betraying how much they envy its object. However, he said, calmly enough, “Why not, madame?”

These are the blunders we commit at five-and-twenty.

This confession agitated Madame de Listomère violently; but Eugène was not yet able to analyze a woman’s face as seen in a glimpse, or from one side. Only her lips turned white.

The Rout, a cold display of luxury, a review of self-conceits in full dress, is one of those English inventions which tend to mechanize other nations.

England seems bent on seeing the whole world as dull as itself, and dull in the same way.

So this second party is, in some French houses, a happy protest on the part of the old spirit of our lighthearted people. Only, unfortunately, so few houses protest; and the reason is a simple one.

Everybody is on the march some whither, or trotting at the heels of Fortune.

Time has become the costliest commodity, so no one can afford the lavish extravagance of going home tomorrow morning and getting up late.

Hence, there is no second soirée now but at the houses of women rich enough to entertain, and since July 1830 such women may be counted in Paris.

I treasured her old gloves; I drank an infusion of the flowers she had worn; I got out of bed at night to go and gaze at her window. All my blood rushed to my heart when I inhaled the perfume she used.

I was miles away from knowing that woman is a stove with a marble casing.

”

“A great lady if ever there was one, a widow without children—oh! all was perfect—my idol would shut herself up to mark my linen with her hair; in short, she responded to my madness by her own.

And how can we fail to believe in passion when it has the guarantee of madness?

“We each devoted all our minds to concealing a love so perfect and so beautiful from the eyes of the world; and we succeeded. And what charm we found in our escapades! Of her I will say nothing.

As she lived alone in the house, the word was a fearful lie.

One single lie destroys the absolute confidence which to some souls is the very foundation of happiness.

“To explain to you what passed in me at that moment it must be assumed that we have an internal self of which the exterior I is but the husk;

And here I must confess that I have always thought that Othello was not only stupid, but showed very bad taste. Only a man who is half a Negro could behave so: indeed Shakespeare felt this when he called his play The Moor of Venice.

The sight of the woman we love is such a balm to the heart that it must dispel anguish, doubt, and sorrow.

All my rage vanished. I could smile again. Hence this cheerfulness, which at my age now would be the most atrocious dissimulation, was the result of my youth and my love. My jealousy once buried, I had the power of observation.

She wished she were my valet, in whose happiness she found a cause of envy, and all this was as elegantly expressed, oh! as Clarissa might have written in her happiness.

There is always a precious ape in the prettiest and most angelic woman!

”

“I will say nothing of the night, nor of the week I spent,” de Marsay went on. “

I discovered that I was a statesman.

”

I took care not to quarrel with this clever woman, who was so good an actress, for I doubt whether true love can give such gracious delights as those lavished by such a dexterous fraud.

Such refined hypocrisy is as good as virtue.

—I am not speaking to you Englishwomen, my lady,” said the Minister, suavely, addressing Lady Barimore, Lord Dudley’s daughter. “I tried to be the same lover.

“You are all ready to condemn the woman,” said Lady Dudley. “Well, I quite understand that she did not regard her marriage as an act of inconstancy.

Men will never distinguish between constancy and fidelity.

—I know the woman whose story Monsieur de Marsay has told us, and she is one of the last of your truly great ladies.”

When an Englishwoman attempts this step, she looks like a grenadier marching forward to attack a redoubt.

The women of Paris have a genius for walking.

The municipality really owed them asphalt footwalks.

Therefore, to attract you to her drawing-room, she will be bewitchingly charming. This especially is where you feel how isolated women are nowadays, and why they want a little world of their own, to which they may seem a constellation.

Conversation is impossible without generalities.

”

“But do you suppose that the treat we are giving you is a common one?” asked Joseph Bridau. “If you had to pay for the charms of conversation as you do for those of dancing or of music, your fortune would be inadequate!

There is no second performance of the same flash of wit.

”

“Because, in these days, under a regime which makes everything small, you prefer small dishes, small rooms, small pictures, small articles, small newspapers, small books, does that prove that women too have grown smaller?

Why should the human heart change because you change your coat?

In all ages the passions remain the same. I know cases of beautiful devotion, of sublime sufferings, which lack the publicity—the glory, if you choose—which formerly gave lustre to the errors of some women.

“

There is nothing more terrible than the revolt of a sheep,

” said de Marsay.

Moon and sun, winter, summer, and snow have eaten into the wood, warped the boards, peeled off the paint. The dreary silence is broken only by birds and cats, polecats, rats, and mice, free to scamper round, and fight, and eat each other.

An invisible hand has written over it all: ‘Mystery.’

“If, prompted by curiosity, you go to look at this house from the street, you will see a large gate, with a round-arched top; the children have made many holes in it. I learned later that this door had been blocked for ten years.

the gutter-spouts broken. What fire from heaven could have fallen there? By what decree has salt been sown on this dwelling? Has God been mocked here? Or was France betrayed? These are the questions we ask ourselves. Reptiles crawl over it, but give no reply.

This empty and deserted house is a vast enigma of which the answer is known to none.

“It was formerly a little domain, held in fief, and is known as La Grande Bretêche. During my stay at Vendôme, where Despleins had left me in charge of a rich patient, the sight of this strange dwelling became one of my keenest pleasures.

on my refusing, he took a large one. He was happy! A man who has no hobby does not know all the good to be got out of life.

A hobby is the happy medium between a passion and a monomania.

At this moment I understood the whole bearing of Sterne’s charming passion, and had a perfect idea of the delight with which my uncle Toby, encouraged by Trim, bestrode his hobbyhorse.

for there is no doubt a particular attitude of confidence and security is necessary to the telling of a narrative. The best tales are told at a certain hour—just as we are all here at table.

No one ever told a story well standing up, or fasting.

“If I were to reproduce exactly Rosalie’s diffuse eloquence, a whole volume would scarcely contain it.

… of its tale of heads that have fallen on the scaffold, a young and pretty woman becomes more interesting for the dubious renown of a happy love or a scandalous desertion, and the more she is to be pitied, the more she excites our sympathies.

We are only pitiless to the commonplace.

If, moreover, we attract all eyes, we are to all intents and purposes great; how, indeed, are we to be seen unless we raise ourselves above other people’s heads?

The Vicomtesse raised her beautiful eyes to the ceiling; and the cornice, no doubt, received all the confidences which a stranger might not hear.

When a woman is afraid to look at her interlocutor, there is in truth no gentler, meeker, more accommodating confidant than the cornice.

The cornice is quite an institution in the boudoir; what is it but the confessional, minus the priest?

and the cornice, no doubt, received all the confidences which a stranger might not hear. When a woman is afraid to look at her interlocutor, there is in truth no gentler, meeker, more accommodating confidant than the cornice.

The cornice is quite an institution in the boudoir; what is it but the confessional, minus the priest?

Mme. de Beauséant was eloquent and beautiful at that moment; nay, “coquettish,” if the word were not too heavy. By justifying herself and love, she was stimulating every sentiment in the man before her;

“Enough, monsieur,” said Mme. de Beauséant; “we have both of us gone too far. By giving you the sad reasons for a refusal which I am compelled to give, I meant to soften it and not to elicit homage.

Coquetry only suits a happy woman.

Believe me, we must remain strangers to each other. At a later day you will know that ties which must inevitably be broken ought not to be formed at all.”

What man is there but keeps within him these virgin memories that grow fairer every time they rise before him, memories that hold up to him the ideal of perfect bliss?

Such recollections are like children who die in the flower of childhood, before their parents have known anything of them but their smiles.

So M. de Nueil came home from Courcelles, the victim of a mood fraught with desperate resolutions. Even now he felt that Mme. de Beauséant was one of the conditions of his existence, and that death would be preferable to life without her.

All this time Mme. de Beauséant’s husband, the present Marquis (his father and elder brother having died), enjoyed the soundest health.

There is no better aid to life than a certain knowledge that our demise would confer a benefit on some fellow-creature.

M. de Beauséant was one of those ironical and wayward beings who, like holders of life-annuities, wake with an additional sense of relish every morning to a consciousness of good health.

A woman does not bend and form herself in a day to the caprices of passion.

The pleasure of loving, like some rare flower, needs the most careful ingenuity of culture.

Time alone, and two souls attuned each to each, can discover all its resources, and call into being all the tender and delicate delights for which we are steeped in a thousand superstitions, imagining them to be inherent in the heart that lavishes them upon …

It is this wonderful response of one nature to another, this religious belief, this certainty of finding peculiar or excessive happiness in the presence of one we love, that accounts in part for perdurable attachments and long-lived passion.

If a woman possesses the genius of her sex, love never comes to be a matter of use and wont.

She brings all her heart and brain to love, clothes her tenderness in forms so varied, there is such art in her most natural moments, or so much nature in her art, that in absence her memory is almost as potent as her presence.

All these things draw them closer to the mother or drive them apart.

God lays the child under the mother’s heart, that she may learn that for a long time to come her heart must be its home.

And yet—there are mothers cruelly slighted, mothers whose sublime, pathetic tenderness meets only a harsh return, a hideous ingratitude which shows how difficult it is to lay down hard-and-fast rules in matters of feeling.

The children scampered through the orchard, scrambled about the terraces, chased the lizards, scarcely less nimble than they; investigating flowers and seeds and insects, continually referring all questions to their mother, running to and fro between the garden and the summerhouse.

Children have no need of toys in the country, everything amuses them.

Mme. Willemsens sat at her embroidery during their lessons. She never spoke, nor did she look at masters or pupils; but she followed attentively all that was said, striving to gather the sense of the words to gain a general idea of Louis’ progress.

developing and strengthening all that was best in their natures with the care of a good fairy. Tears sometimes rose to her burning eyes as she watched them play, and thought how they had never caused her the slightest vexation.

Happiness so far-reaching and complete brings such tears, because for us it represents the dim imaginings of Heaven which we all of us form in our minds.

Those were delicious hours spent on that sofa in the garden-house, in looking out on sunny days over the wide stretches of river and the picturesque landscape, listening to the sound of her children’s voices as they laughed at their own laughter, to the little …

… couples coming to Saint-Cyr, then the Petite Courtille of Tours, and knots of folk out for their evening walk along the “dike,” saw a pale, thin figure dressed in black, a woman with a worn yet bright face, gliding like a shadow along the terraces.

Great suffering cannot be concealed.

The vinedresser’s household had grown quiet also. Sometimes the laborer and his wife and children were gathered about the door of their cottage, while Annette was washing linen at the wellhead, and Mme.

“If only I could take that smile with me!” she said, drying her eyes.

Then she went into the house and took to the bed, which she would only leave for her coffin.

A week went by, one day exactly like another. Old Annette and Louis took it in turns to sit up with Mme. Willemsens, never taking their eyes from the invalid.

On the fifth day of that fatal week the doctor interdicted flowers in the room.

The illusions of life were going one by one.

Then Marie and his brother felt their mother’s lips hot as fire beneath their kisses; and at last, on the Saturday evening, Mme. Willemsens was too ill to bear the slightest sound, and her room was left in disorder.

“Listen,” she began. “Those twelve thousand francs are all that you have in the world. You must keep the money upon you, because when I am dead the lawyers will come and seal everything up.

Nothing will be yours then, not even your mother.

All that remains for you to do will be to go out, poor orphan children, God knows where. I have made Annette’s future secure. She will have an annuity of a hundred crowns, and she will stay at Tours no doubt.

I myself played a part in this almost commonplace tragedy; so if it fails to interest you, the failure will be in part my own fault, in part owing to historical veracity.

Plenty of things in real life are superlatively uninteresting; so that it is one-half of art to select from realities those which contain possibilities of poetry.

In 1819 I was traveling from Paris to Moulins. The state of my finances obliged me to take an outside place. Englishmen, as you know, regard those airy perches on the top of the coach as the best seats;

Our bashful fears, our silent interjections, our blushes, as we met each other’s eyes, were expressive with an eloquence, a boyish charm, which I have ceased to feel.

One must remain young, no doubt, to understand youth.

Well, we understood one another to admiration on all the essential points of passion.

“

Ah! you love! May you be happy always. May you never lose her whom you love.

”

and by her manner, and by the tones of her voice, she had always made him sensible of the distance which socially lay between them.

Gratitude is a charge upon the inheritance which the second generation is apt to repudiate.

“This adventure,” Derville began after a pause, “brings the one romantic event in my life to my mind. You are laughing already,” he went on; “it seems so ridiculous, doesn’t it, that an attorney should speak of a romance in his life?

“His life flowed soundless as the sands of an hourglass.

His victims sometimes flew into a rage and made a great deal of noise, followed by a great silence; so is it in a kitchen after a fowl’s neck has been wrung.

“Toward evening this bill of exchange incarnate would assume ordinary human shape, and his metals were metamorphosed into a human heart. When he was satisfied with his day’s business, he would rub his hands;

“ ‘

The women never marry in our family.

’

but though I set myself to study him, I must confess, to my shame, that his real nature was impenetrable up to the very last. I even felt doubts at times as to his sex.

If all usurers are like this one, I maintain that they belong to the neuter gender.

“Did he adhere to his mother’s religion? Did he look on Gentiles as his legitimate prey? Had he turned Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Muhammadan, Brahmin, or whatnot?

If you had lived as long as I have, you would know that there is but one concrete reality invariable enough to be worth caring about, and that is—Gold.

Gold represents every form of human power.

I have traveled. I found out that there were either hills or plains everywhere: the plains are monotonous, the hills a weariness; consequently, place may be left out of the question. As to manners; man is man all the world over.

consequently, it is better to exploit than to be exploited. Everywhere you find the man of thews and sinews who toils, and the lymphatic man who torments himself; and pleasures are everywhere the same, for when all sensations are exhausted, all that survives is Vanity—

Vanity is the abiding substance of us, the I in us.

Vanity is only to be satisfied by gold in floods. Our dreams need time and physical means and painstaking thought before they can be realized. Well, gold contains all things in embryo; gold realizes all things for us.

As for your scientific curiosity, a kind of wrestling bout in which man is never uppermost, I replace it by an insight into all the springs of action in man and woman.

To sum up, the world is mine without effort of mine, and the world has not the slightest hold on me.

Listen to this,’ he went on, ‘I will tell you the history of my morning, and you will divine my pleasures.’

“ ‘ “My name is Gobseck, tell her that I shall call again at twelve o’clock,” and I went out, leaving traces of my muddy boots on the carpet which covered the paved staircase.

I like to leave mud on a rich man’s carpet; it is not petty spite; I like to make them feel a touch of the claws of Necessity.

In the Rue Montmartre I thrust open the old gateway of a poor-looking house, and looked into a dark courtyard where the sunlight never shines.

I myself keep an eye on eldest sons, artists, people in the great world, and gamblers—on the most sensational side of Paris. Everyone who comes to us lets us into his neighbor’s secrets.

Thwarted passion and mortified vanity are great babblers. Vice and disappointment and vindictiveness are the best of all detectives.

My colleagues, like myself, have enjoyed all things, are sated with all things, and have reached the point when power and money are loved for their own sake.

One of her uncles, a well-to-do farmer, died and left her seventy thousand francs, which helped to clear off the loan. From that day my life has been nothing but happiness and prosperity.

Nothing is more utterly uninteresting than a happy man, so let us say no more on that head, and return to the rest of the characters.

“About a year after the purchase of the practice, I was dragged into a bachelor breakfast-party given by one of our number who had lost a bet to a young man greatly in vogue in the fashionable world. M.

and why, seeing that I was a friend, and he meant to do me a kindness, he should not have yielded to the wish and made it complete.—“My son,” he said, “

I released you from all need to feel any gratitude by giving you ground for the belief that you owed me nothing.

”—So we are the best friends in the world. That answer, monsieur, gives you the man better than any amount of description.’

“ ‘There are excellent reasons for that,’ he said; ‘the noble Count is at death’s door. He is one of the soft stamp that cannot learn how to put an end to chagrin, and allow it to wear them out instead.

Life is a craft, a profession; every man must take the trouble to learn that business.

When he has learned what life is by dint of painful experiences, the fibre of him is toughened, and acquires a certain elasticity, so that he has his sensibilities under his own control;

Now, I have often noticed, and always with new wonder, that two antagonists almost always divine each other’s inmost thoughts and ideas.

Two enemies sometimes possess a power of clear insight into mental processes, and read each other’s minds as two lovers read in either soul.

So when we came together, the Countess and I, I understood at once the reason of her antipathy for me, disguised though it was by the most gracious forms of politeness and civility.

“I learned later on that the woman was studying the Code, with her husband’s dying moans in her ears. If we could picture the thoughts of those who stand about a deathbed, what fearful sights should we not see?

Money is always the motive-spring of the schemes elaborated, of all the plans that are made and the plots that are woven about it!

Let us leave these details, nauseating in the nature of them; but perhaps they may have given you some insight into all that this husband and wife endured; perhaps too they may unveil much that is passing in secret in other houses.

exclaimed the dying man, shaking off the Countess, who lay groveling over his feet.—‘You turn me to ice!’ he added, and there was something appalling in the indifference with which he uttered the words. ‘

You have been a bad daughter; you have been a bad wife; you will be a bad mother.

’

“ ‘Help him!’ cried Gobseck. ‘Not I.

Adversity is the greatest of all teachers; adversity teaches us to know the value of money and the worth of men and women.

Let him set sail on the seas of Paris; when he is a qualified pilot, we will give him a ship to steer.’

The familiarity of that face makes a description of the Consul’s unnecessary. It may, however, be noted that there was no affectation in his dreamy expression.

Lord Byron was a poet, and the Consul was poetical; women know and recognize the difference, which explains without justifying some of their attachments.

His handsome face, thrown into relief by a delightful nature, had captivated a Genoese heiress. A Genoese heiress! the expression might raise a smile at Genoa, where, in consequence of the inability of daughters to inherit, a woman is rarely rich;

they are very ready to immolate themselves for the common weal. Onorina Pedrotti, who might have hated the Consul if she had been altogether scorned, loved her sposo no less, and perhaps more, when she know that he had loved.

Women allow precedence in love affairs. All is well if other women are in question.

A man is not a diplomat with impunity:

If, at that period, anyone had said to me, ‘You will see Canalis, or Camille Maupin,’ I should have felt hot coals in my head and in my bowels.

Famous people were to me as gods, who neither spoke, nor walked, nor ate like other mortals.

“How many tales of the Thousand-and-One Nights are comprehended in the ripening of a youth! How many wonderful lamps must we have rubbed before we understand that the True Wonderful Lamp is either luck, or work, or genius.

“How many tales of the Thousand-and-One Nights are comprehended in the ripening of a youth!

How many wonderful lamps must we have rubbed before we understand that the True Wonderful Lamp is either luck, or work, or genius.

In some men this dream of the aroused spirit is but brief; mine has lasted until now! In those days I always went to sleep as Grand Duke of Tuscany—as a millionaire—as beloved by a princess—or famous!

A secretary necessarily watches the man who makes use of him. That man’s tastes, passions, temper, and manias become the subject of involuntary study.

The union of their two minds is at once more and less than a marriage.

“During these months the Count and I reciprocally studied each other. I learned with astonishment that Comte Octave was but thirty-seven years old.

this brave statesman was religious, without ostentation; he always attended the earliest Mass at Saint-Paul’s for pious workmen and servants. Not one of his friends, no one at Court, knew that he so punctually fulfilled the practice of religion.

He was addicted to God as some men are addicted to a vice, with the greatest mystery.

Thus one day I came to find the Count at the summit of an Alp of woe much higher than that on which many are who think themselves the most tried;

“

Now a harmless lunatic is the only man whom no woman ever distrusts in the matter of sentiment.

You will see how wise the Count had been in choosing this disguise for me.

These two divided beings would each lie awake, one in the hope, the other in agonizing dread of reunion.

The real dramas of life are not in circumstances, but in feelings; they are played in the heart, or, if you please, in that vast realm which we ought to call the Spiritual World.

Octave and Honorine moved and lived altogether in the world of lofty spirits.

I threw into it all the faculties of my being, which were not impoverished by their effusiveness; they were exhausted by that delusive intimacy in which I alone was genuine.

For me the cup of happiness is not drained, nor empty; and nothing can refill it, for it is broken.

I am out of the fray; I have no weapons left. Having thus utterly abandoned myself, what am I?—the leavings of a feast. I had but one name bestowed on me, Honorine, as I had but one heart.

“Of the plains of Champagne and the snowy, storm-beaten but sublime Alps, what young man would choose the chalky, monotonous level? No; such comparisons are fatal and wrong on the threshold of the Mairie.

Alas! only the experience of life can teach us that marriage excludes passion, that a family cannot have its foundation on the tempests of love.

After having dreamed of impossible love, with its infinite caprices, after having tasted the tormenting delights of the ideal, I saw before me modest reality. Pity me, for what could be expected! At five-and-twenty I did not trust myself; but I took a manful resolution.

“

Instinct in women is as strong as the perspicacity of great men.

“ ‘You wanted an answer to your letter, did you not? And there was but one man in the world who could write it. You must read the reply, my dear Countess;

“Mademoiselle, you would be right if marriage were based on passion; and that was the mistake of those two, who will soon be no more.

Marriage with heart-deep love on both sides would be Paradise.

”

“I will come again tonight,” said the stranger at length, with the tenacious desire, peculiar to the unfortunate, to catch humanity at fault.

The only irony allowed to poverty is to drive Justice and Benevolence to unjust denials. When a poor wretch has convicted Society of falsehood, he throws himself more eagerly on the mercy of God.

“What do you think of that for a cracked pot?” said Simonnin, without waiting till the old man had shut the door.

… they show me out, either with the air of cold politeness, which you all know how to assume to rid yourself of a hapless wretch, or brutally, like men who think they have to deal with a swindler or a madman—it depends on their nature.

I have been buried under the dead; but now I am buried under the living, under papers, under facts, under the whole of society, which wants to shove me underground again!

”

The Colonel was like the lady who, having been ill of a fever for fifteen years, fancied she had some fresh complaint when she was cured.

There are joys in which we have ceased to believe; they fall on us, it is like a thunderbolt; they burn us.

The poor man’s gratitude was too great to find utterance. To superficial observers he seemed cold, but Derville saw complete honesty under this amazement. A swindler would have found his voice.

At Carlsruhe I had an attack of neuralgia in the head, and lay for six weeks on straw in an inn. I should never have ended if I were to tell you all the distresses of my life as a beggar.

Moral suffering, before which physical suffering pales, nevertheless excites less pity, because it is not seen.

I remember shedding tears, as I stood in front of a fine house in Strasbourg where once I had given an entertainment, and where nothing was given me, not even a piece of bread.

“Compromise!” echoed Colonel Chabert. “

Am I dead, or am I alive?

”

Now, a well-colored pipe is to a smoker a precious possession; but the impulse was so natural, the emotion so generous, that every smoker, and the excise office itself, would have pardoned this crime of treason to tobacco.

Perhaps the angels may have picked up the pieces.

“Colonel, it is an exceedingly complicated business,” said Derville as they left the room to walk up and down in the sunshine.

Derville looked at the dairyman, and stepped back a few paces to glance at the house, the yard, the manure-pool, the cowhouse, the rabbits, the children.

“On my honor, I believe it is characteristic of virtue to have nothing to do with riches!”

thought he.

And he set to work to study the Countess’ position, falling into one of those brown studies to which great politicians give themselves up when concocting their own plans and trying to guess the secrets of a hostile Cabinet.

Are not attorneys, in a way, statesmen in charge of private affairs?

But a brief survey of the situation in which the Comte Ferraud and his wife now found themselves is necessary for a comprehension of the lawyer’s cleverness.

As he saw Colonel Chabert’s wife, rich with his spoil, in the lap of luxury and the height of fashion, while he, poor wretch, was living with a poor dairyman among the beasts, the lawyer said to himself:

“The moral of all this is that a pretty woman will never acknowledge as her husband, nor even as a lover, a man in an old box-coat, a tow wig, and boots with holes in them.”

A mischievous and bitter smile expressed the feelings, half philosophical and half satirical, which such a man was certain to experience—a man well situated to know the truth of things in spite of the lies behind which most families in Paris hide their mode of …

“Madness! you will be caught and executed like any common wretch. Besides you might miss! That would be unpardonable.

A man must not miss his shot when he wants to kill his wife.

—Let me set things straight; you are only a big child. Go now. Take care of yourself; she is capable of setting some trap for you and shutting you up in Charenton. I will notify her of our proceedings to protect you against a surprise.”

But still it was at once a reproach and a pardon, a hope and a despair, a question and an answer. This word included them all; none but an actress could have thrown so much eloquence, so many feelings into a single word.

Truth is less complete in its utterance; it does not put everything on the outside; it allows us to see what is within.

The Colonel was filled with remorse for his suspicions, his demands, and his anger; he looked down not to betray his agitation.

The Colonel with a wave of his hand bid his wife be silent, and for a mile and a half they sat without speaking a single word. Chabert could fancy he saw the two little ones before him.

“The dead are very wrong to come to life again.”

“Oh, monsieur, no, no! Do not think me ungrateful. Only, you find me a lover, a mother, while you left me merely a wife.

The Countess gave him a flashing look full of such deep gratitude that poor Chabert would have been glad to sink again into his grave at Eylau.

Some men have a soul strong enough for such self-devotion, of which the whole reward consists in the assurance that they have made the person they love happy.

“My dear friend, we will talk all this over later when our hearts have rested,” said the Countess.

She revived his love without awakening his desires, and allowed her first husband to discern the mental wealth she had acquired while trying to accustom him to moderate his pleasure to that which a father may feel in the society of a favorite daughter.

The Colonel had known the Countess of the Empire; he found her a Countess of the Restoration.

At last, by a crossroad, they arrived at the entrance to a large park lying in the little valley which divides the heights of Margency from the pretty village of Groslay.

The Countess had there a delightful house, where the Colonel on arriving found everything in readiness for his stay there, as well as for his wife’s.

Misfortune is a kind of talisman whose virtue consists in its power to confirm our original nature; in some men it increases their distrust and malignancy, just as it improves the goodness of those who have a kind heart.

Sorrow had made the Colonel even more helpful and good than he had always been, and he could understand some secrets of womanly distress which are unrevealed to most men. Nevertheless, in spite of his loyal trustfulness, he could not help saying to his wife:

Chabert, in fact, disappeared. The dairyman failed in business, and became a hackney-cab driver. The Colonel, perhaps, took up some similar industry for a time.

Perhaps, like a stone flung into a chasm, he went falling from ledge to ledge, to be lost in the mire of rags that seethes through the streets of Paris.

Six months after this event, Derville, hearing no more of Colonel Chabert or the Comtesse Ferraud, supposed that they had no doubt come to a compromise, which the Countess, out of revenge, had had arranged by some other lawyer.

By the consensus even of his enemies, he took with him to the tomb an incommunicable method. Like all men of genius, he had no heirs; he carried everything in him, and carried it away with him.

The glory of a surgeon is like that of an actor: they live only so long as they are alive, and their talent leaves no trace when they are gone.

Actors and surgeons, like great singers too, like the executants who by their performance increase the power of music tenfold, are all the heroes of a moment.

The qualities of a great man are often federative. If among these colossal spirits one has more talent than wit, his wit is still superior to that of a man of whom it is simply stated that “he is witty.” Genius always presupposes moral insight.

This insight may be applied to a special subject; but he who can see a flower must be able to see the sun.

The man who on hearing a diplomat he had saved ask, “How is the Emperor?” could say, “The courtier is alive; the man will follow!”—that man is not merely a surgeon or a physician, he is prodigiously witty also.

“I threw into my work the fury I felt at my misery. I tried to master positive knowledge so as to acquire the greatest personal value, and merit the position I should hold as soon as I could escape from nothingness.

I consumed more oil than bread; the light I burned during these endless nights cost me more than food.

It was a long duel, obstinate, with no sort of consolation. I found no sympathy anywhere.

I found no sympathy anywhere. To have friends, must we not form connections with young men, have a few sous so as to be able to go tippling with them, and meet them where students congregate? And I had nothing!

And no one in Paris can understand that nothing means nothing.

When I even thought of revealing my beggary, I had that nervous contraction of the throat which makes a sick man believe that a ball rises up from the oesophagus into the larynx.

If, to make a stand against this armament of pygmies, you collect your best powers, your best friends will cry out that you want to have everything, that you aim at domineering, at tyranny.

In short, your good points will become your faults, your faults will be vices, and your virtues crime.

“If you save a man, you will be said to have killed him; if he reappears on the scene, it will be positive that you have secured the present at the cost of the future. If he is not dead, he will die.

“

So, you see, my dear fellow, if I do not believe in God, I believe still less in man.

But do not you know in me another Desplein, altogether different from the Desplein whom everyone abuses?—However, we will not stir that mud-heap.

“

He fell ill. As you may suppose, I passed my nights by his bedside, and the first time I pulled him through; but two years after he had a relapse; in spite of the utmost care, in spite of the greatest exertions of science, he succumbed.

No king was ever nursed as he was. Yes, Bianchon, to snatch that man from death I tried unheard-of things.

“That, my dear fellow, is as much as a man who holds my opinions can allow himself.

But God must be a good fellow; He cannot owe me any grudge. I swear to you, I would give my whole fortune if faith such as Bourgeat’s could enter my brain.

”

Whatever women may achieve with their cosmetics, they can do nothing against those incorruptible witnesses to their experiences. There each year of life has left its stigmata.

When a woman’s temples are flaccid, seamed, withered in a particular way; when at the tip of her nose you see those minute specks, which look like the imperceptible black smuts which are shed in London by the chimneys in which coal is burnt.⁠ ⁠… Your servant, sir! That woman is more than thirty.

She may be handsome, witty, loving—whatever you please, but she is past thirty, she is arriving at maturity. I do not blame men who attach themselves to that kind of woman;

I do not blame men who attach themselves to that kind of woman; only, a man of your superior distinction must not mistake a winter pippin for a little summer apple, smiling on the bough, and waiting for you to crunch it.

Love never goes to study the registers of birth and marriage; no one loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or clever; we love because we love.

”

I tell you this: That fragile, fair woman, with her chestnut hair, who pities herself that she may be pitied, enjoys an iron constitution, an appetite like a wolf’s, and the strength and cowardice of a tiger.

Gauze, and silk, and muslin were never more cleverly twisted round a lie!

Ecco.”

“

I, as a physician, know that a sound stomach excludes a good heart.

Your woman of fashion feels nothing; her rage for pleasure has its source in a longing to heat up her cold nature, a craving for excitement and enjoyment, like an old man who stands night after night by the footlights at the opera.

As she has more brain than heart, she sacrifices genuine passion and true friends to her triumph, as a general sends his most devoted subalterns to the front in order to win a battle.

The woman of fashion ceases to be a woman; she is neither mother, nor wife, nor lover. She is, medically speaking, sex in the brain.

And your Marquise, too, has all the characteristics of her monstrosity, the beak of a bird of prey, the clear, cold eye, the gentle voice—she is as polished as the steel of a machine, she touches everything except the heart.”

if the King promised him the prairie, and the Almighty gave him the Order of Paradise with the revenues of Purgatory, not one of all these powers would induce him to transfer a single straw from one saucer of his scales into the other.

He is a judge, as Death is Death.

”

No one at the Courts, no one in Paris, knew of this secret life of Popinot’s.

There are virtues so splendid that they necessitate obscurity; men make haste to hide them under a bushel.

As to those whom the lawyer succored, they, hard at work all day and tired at night, were little able to sing his praises; theirs was the gracelessness of children, who can never pay because they owe too much. There is such compulsory ingratitude;

As to those whom the lawyer succored, they, hard at work all day and tired at night, were little able to sing his praises; theirs was the gracelessness of children, who can never pay because they owe too much.

There is such compulsory ingratitude; but what heart that has sown good to reap gratitude can think itself great?

By the end of the second year of his apostolic work, Popinot had turned the storeroom at the bottom of his house into a parlor, lighted by the three iron-barred windows.

In the cupboard were his registers of donations, his tickets for orders for bread, and his diary.

He kept his ledger like a tradesman, that he might not be ruined by kindness.

All the sorrows of the neighborhood were entered and numbered in a book, where each had its little account, as merchants’ customers have theirs.

“You think so, do you?” said his uncle. “

If you listen to only one bell, you hear only one sound.

”

… proving too much you prove nothing.—My dear boy,” said the old man, laying the document on his knee, “where is the mother who ever lacked heart and wit and yearning to such a degree as to fall below the inspirations suggested by her animal instinct?

A mother is as cunning to get at her children as a girl can be in the conduct of a love intrigue.

If your Marquise really wanted to give her children food and clothes, the Devil himself would not have hindered her, heh? That is rather too big a fable for an old lawyer to swallow!—To proceed.

“Monsieur, I owe you a million thanks—”

“A million thanks,” thought he to himself, “that is too many; it does not mean one.”

“For the trouble you condescend—”

The work in Court is most fatiguing, it would seem. Why have they not twice as many judges?”

“Ah, madame, that would not be difficult; we should be none the worse if they had. But when that happens, fowls will cut their teeth!”

As he heard this speech, so entirely in character with the lawyer’s appearance, the Chevalier measured him from head to foot, out of one eye, as much as to say, “We shall easily manage him.”

“My dear fellow, how can I help it?” said Bianchon. “Did not I warn you? He is not a man you can get over.”

“No,” said Rastignac; “he is a man you must run over.”

The doctor was obliged to make his bow to the Marquise and her mute Chevalier to catch up Popinot, who, not being the man to endure an embarrassing position, was pacing through the rooms.

“Ah, we are used to seeing these little family conspiracies,” said Popinot. “Not a year passes without a number of verdicts of ‘insufficient evidence’ against applications of this kind.

In our state of society such an attempt brings no dishonor, while we send a poor devil to the galleys who breaks a pane of glass dividing him from a bowl full of gold.

Our Code is not faultless.”

“My boy, do you not know all the judicial romances with which clients impose on their attorneys?

If the attorneys condemned themselves to state nothing but the truth, they would not earn enough to keep their office open.

”

The widow wore a green gown trimmed with chinchilla, which looked on her as a splash of dirty oil would look on a bride’s veil.

In short, everything about her harmonized with her last words: “Here I am.”

“Madame,” said Popinot, “you are suspected of having used some seductive arts to induce M. d’Espard to hand over to you very considerable sums of money.”

I had the smallpox. I was kept two years in my room without stirring, and I came out of it the size you see me, hideous forever, and as wretched as could be.

These are my seductive arts.

”