Artists of refusal

 18) Joseph Joubert was born in Montignac in 1754 and died seventy years later. He never wrote a book. He only prepared himself to write one, single-mindedly searching for the right conditions. Then he forgot this purpose as well. 

 In his search for the right conditions to write a book, Joubert discovered a delightful place where he could digress and end up not writing a book at all. He almost put down roots during his search. And the point is, as Blanchot says, what he was searching for, the source of all writing, that space where he could write, that light which ought to be circumscribed in space, demanded of him and confirmed in him dispositions which made him unsuitable for any ordinary literary work or distracted him from the same. 

 In this respect Joubert was one of the first totally modern writers, preferring the centre to the sphere, sacrificing results in order to discover their conditions, and not writing in order to add one book to another, but to seize control of the point from which all books seemed to him to originate, which, once attained, would exempt him from writing them. 

 However, it is still curious that Joubert should not have written a book, since he was, from very early on, only attracted by and interested in what was being written. From a very young age he had been drawn to the world of books that were going to be written. In his youth he was very close to Diderot, afterwards to Restif de la Bretonne, both of whom produced abundant works. In his later years almost all his friends were famous writers with whom he lived immersed in the world of letters and who, knowing his immense literary talent, encouraged him to break his silence. 

 The story goes that Chateaubriand, who exerted great influence over Joubert, came up to him one day and remarked, “Ask that prolific writer lurking inside you to stop being so damn prejudiced, will you?” 

 By that time Joubert had already digressed in his search for the source of all books and was already clear that, were he to locate that source, he would be exempted from writing a book. 

 “I can’t yet,” he replied to Chateaubriand, “I still haven’t found the source that is the object of my search. But if I do find it, I shall have even more reason not to write that book you would have me write.” 

 While he searched and amused himself in his digressions, he kept a secret diary of a purely personal nature, which he had no intention of ever publishing. But his friends behaved badly towards him and, on his death, took the liberty in dubious taste of publishing this diary. 

 It has been said that Joubert did not write his long-awaited book because he thought the diary was enough. Such a claim seems to me preposterous. I do not believe that Joubert was taken in, seeing in his diary a substitute for literary abundance. The pages of his diary served simply to express the numerous ups and downs he went through in his heroic quest for the source of all writing. 

 There are priceless moments in his diary as when, at the age of forty-five, he writes, “But what is my art exactly? What goal does it aspire to? What do I hope to achieve by practising it? Is it to write and to know that others are reading me? Sole ambition of so many! Is that what I want? This is what I must investigate stealthily and at length until I uncover the answer.” 

 In his stealthy and prolonged search, he always acted with admirable lucidity and never lost sight of the fact that, even as an author without a book and a writer without texts, he still moved in the field of art: “Here I am, detached from civil things, in the pure region of art.” 

 More than once he saw himself as taken up with a task more fundamental to art, and of greater essential interest, than a work: “One must resemble art without resembling a single work.” 

 What was this essential task? Joubert would not have liked someone saying they knew what this essential task consisted of. In reality Joubert understood that he was looking for what he did not know, hence the difficulty of his search and the joy of his discoveries as a digressive thinker. Joubert wrote in his diary. “But how to look in the right place when one does not even know what one is looking for? This happens whenever one composes and creates. Fortunately, by digressing, one does not simply make a discovery, one has happy encounters.” 

 Joubert knew the happiness of the art of digression, of which he was possibly the founder. 

 When Joubert says he is uncertain about the essence of his strange task as a digressive, he reminds me of what happened to György Lukács once when, surrounded by his followers, the Hungarian philosopher was being showered with praise regarding his work. Overwhelmed, Lukács made the remark, “Yes, yes, but now I see that I have not understood the crux of the matter.” “And what is that?” they asked him in surprise. To which he responded, “The trouble is I don’t know.” 

 Joubert — who wondered how to look in the right place when one does not even know what one is looking for — reflects in his diary on the difficulties he had finding a refuge or adequate space for his ideas: “My ideas! I can’t seem to manage to build a house where they can live.” 

 Such an adequate space he may have imagined as a cathedral which would fill the entire firmament. An impossible book. Joubert foreshadows Mallarmé’s ideals: “It would be tempting,” writes Blanchot, “and at the same time glorious for Joubert to see in him an untranscribed first edition of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, of which Valéry said, ‘It finally raised a page to the potential of the starry sky. ’” 

 Joubert’s dreams and the work produced a century later share a common ambition: the desire (in both Joubert and Mallarmé) to replace ordinary reading, where it is necessary to go from one part to another, with the spectacle of a simultaneous word, in which everything would be said at once without confusion, in a glow that is — to quote Joubert — “total, peaceable, intimate and uniform at last”. 

 So it was that Joseph Joubert spent his life searching for a book he never wrote, though, when all is considered, he wrote it without realising, thinking of writing it.

**

27) I am going to make a third exception for suicides, and I’m going to make it for Chamfort. In a literary magazine, an article by Javier Cercas has set me on the track of a fierce supporter of the No: Monsieur Chamfort, who said that almost all men are slaves because they do not dare to articulate the word no. 

 As a man of letters, Chamfort was lucky from the start, he tasted success without making the slightest effort. The same was true of success in life. Women loved him, and his early works, mediocre though they were, ushered him into the salons, even arousing the royal fervour (Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette would cry uncontrollably at the end of performances of his works). It was not long before he entered the French Academy, and he enjoyed extraordinary social prestige at an early stage. However, Chamfort felt profound contempt for the world that surrounded him and he very quickly opposed his own personal advantages, with the natural consequences. He was a moralist, though not of the kind we have to put up with nowadays; Chamfort was not a hypocrite, he did not say that the world was horrendous only to save himself, he despised himself whenever he looked in the mirror: “Man is a stupid animal, judging by me.” 

 His moralism was not fake, he did not use his moralism to gain the prestige of an upright man. “Our hero,” Camus wrote about Chamfort, “will go even further, because the renunciation of his own advantages means nothing and the destruction of his body is unimportant (the way he committed suicide was savage), compared to the disintegration of his own spirit. This is, ultimately, what determines Chamfort’s greatness and the strange beauty of the novel he did not write, but the necessary elements of which he left us so that we could imagine it.” 

 He did not write that novel — he left Maxims and Thoughts, Characters and Anecdotes, but never novels — and his ideals, his radical No to the society of his time, drove him to a kind of desperate sainthood. “His extreme, cruel attitude,” says Camus, “led him to that final denial which is silence.” 

 In one of his Maxims we read the following: “M., whom they wanted to discuss various public and private matters, coldly replied, ‘Every day I add to the list of things I don’t talk about; the greatest philosopher would be the one with the longest list.’” 

 This will lead Chamfort to negate works of art and the pure force of language they contain, which he tried to communicate over such a long period. The denial of art led him to even more extreme denials, including that “final denial” referred to by Camus, who, commenting on why Chamfort did not write a novel and fell into an extended silence, has this to say: “Art is the opposite of silence, constituting one of the signs of that complicity which joins us to men in our common struggle. For someone who has lost that complicity and has sided completely with rejection, neither language nor art conserve their expression. This is, no doubt, the reason why that novel of a denial was never written: precisely because it was the novel of a denial. The point is that this art contains the very principles that ought to lead it to negate itself.” 

 As we can see, Camus — a yes-artist if there ever was one in his firm belief that art is the opposite of silence — would have been somewhat paralysed had he known the work, for example, of Beckett and other consummate, recent disciples of Bartleby. 

 Chamfort took his no so far that, the day he thought that the French Revolution, which initially he had been enthusiastic about, had condemned him, he shot himself, breaking his nose and disgorging his right eye in the process. Still not dead, he returned to the attack, slitting his throat with a knife and cutting into his flesh. Bathed in blood, he stuck the knife into his chest and, after slashing his wrists and the backs of his knees, he collapsed in a vast pool of blood. 

 But, as has already been said, this was nothing compared to the disintegration of his spirit. 

 “Why don’t you publish?” he had asked himself a few months earlier in a short text, “Products of the Perfected Civilisation”. 

From among his numerous answers, I have selected the following: 

 Because it seems to me that the public have the ultimate in bad taste and a desire for denigration. 

 Because we are encouraged to work for the same absurd reasons as when we look out of the window and hope to see monkeys and bear-tamers in the streets. 

 Because I am afraid to die without having lived. 

 Because the more my literary status declines, the happier I feel. 

 Because I do not want to imitate lettered people, who are like donkeys kicking and fighting in front of an empty manger. 

 Because the public are only interested in successes they do not appreciate.

**

48) Wakefield and Bartleby are two reclusive characters who are intimately linked. At the same time the first is linked, also intimately, with Walser, and the second with Kafka. 

 Wakefield — that man invented by Hawthorne, that husband who suddenly and without reason abandons his wife and home and for twenty years (in the next street, unbeknown to all, since they think he is dead) leads a solitary existence, stripped of meaning — is a clear forerunner of many of Walser’s characters, all those splendid walking nobodies who wish to disappear, simply disappear, to hide in an anonymous unreality. 

 As for Bartleby, he is a clear forerunner of Kafka’s characters — “Bartleby,” Borges has written, “defines a genre which in around 1919 Kafka would reinvent and develop: the genre of fantasies of conduct and feeling” — and also a predecessor of Kafka himself, that reclusive writer who saw that his workplace signified life, namely his own death; that recluse “in the middle of a deserted office”, that man who walked through all of Prague, resembling a bat, in his overcoat and black bowler hat. 

 To talk — both Wakefield and Bartleby seem to suggest — is to make a pact with the nonsense of existing. Both display a profound denial of the world. They are like that Kafkan Odradek of no fixed abode who lives on the staircase of a paterfamilias or in any other hole. 

 Not everyone knows, or wishes to accept, that Herman Melville, the creator of Bartleby, had dark moments more often than is desirable. Let us see what Julian Hawthorne, the son of Wakefield’s creator, says about him: “There was vivid genius in this man, and he was the strangest being that ever came into our circle. Through all his wild and reckless adventures, of which a small part only got into his fascinating books, he had been unable to rid himself of a Puritan conscience [...]. He was restless and disposed to dark hours, and there is reason to suspect that there was in him a vein of insanity.” 

 Hawthorne and Melville, unwitting founders of the dark hours of the art of the No, knew each other, they were friends, and expressed mutual admiration. Hawthorne was also a Puritan, even in his violent reaction to certain aspects of Puritanism. He was also restless. He was never one to go to church, but we know that during his years as a recluse he would approach his window and watch those making their way to church, and his look is said to have contained the brief history of the Dark Side in the art of the No. His vision was clouded by the terrible Calvinist doctrine of predestination. This is the side to Hawthorne that so fascinated Melville, who to praise him spoke of the great power of blackness, that nocturnal side that we find in Melville as well. 

 Melville was convinced that there was some secret in Hawthorne’s life that had never been revealed, and which accounted for the gloomy passages in his books, and it is strange that he should think this if we bear in mind that such imaginings were equally typical of him, whose conduct was more than gloomy, particularly once he understood that, after his first, celebrated great literary successes — he was mistaken for a journalist, for a maritime reporter — he could only hope for unbroken failure as a writer. 

 It is odd, but so much talk of Bartleby’s syndrome and I still hadn’t mentioned in these footnotes that Melville had the syndrome before his character existed, which might lead us to think he may have created Bartleby in order to describe his own syndrome. 

 It is also odd to observe how, so many pages into this diary — which, by the way, is cutting me off from the outside world and turning me into a ghost: the days I go for a walk locally, I find myself imitating Wakefield, as though I too had a wife and she thought I was dead and I carried on living in the next street, writing this book of footnotes and spying on her from time to time, spying on her, for example, when she goes shopping — I had hardly said anything till now about literary failure as a direct cause of the appearance of the Evil One, the illness, the syndrome, the refusal to continue writing. However, the case of failures, all things considered, is not especially interesting, it’s too obvious, there is no merit in being a writer of the No because you have failed. Failure throws too much light and not enough shade of mystery on the cases of those who give up writing for such a vulgar reason. 

 If suicide is a decision of such excessively radical complexity that in the end it becomes an incredibly simple one, to leave off writing because one has failed strikes me as even more overwhelmingly simple. However, one case of failure I’m prepared to make an exception for is that of Melville. He has the right to whatever he wants (given that he invented the simple, but at the same time extremely complex, subtle acceptance of Bartleby, a character who never opted for the thick, straight line of death by his own hand, and certainly not for tears and desertion in the face of failure; no, Bartleby, when confronted by failure, conceded magnificently, he did not commit suicide or become interminably bitter, he simply ate ginger-nuts, which was all that would allow him to carry on “preferring not to”), I forgive Melville everything. 

 The relative (relative because he came up with another failure, Bartleby’s, and so eased his conscience) disaster of Melville’s literary career can be summed up in the following way: after his first adventure stories, which met with great success because he was mistaken for a mere chronicler of maritime life, the publication of Mardi completely disconcerted his public, since it was, and still is, a fairly unreadable novel, although its plot prefigures future works by Kafka: it is about an endless pursuit over an endless sea. Moby Dick, in 1851, alarmed virtually everyone who bothered to read it. Pierre or the Ambiguities displeased the critics hugely and The Piazza Tales (where the story “Bartleby” finally ended up, having been published anonymously three years earlier in a magazine) went unnoticed. 

 It was in 1853 that Melville, who was only thirty-four, reached the conclusion that he had failed. While he had been considered a chronicler of maritime life, everything had been fine, but when he began to produce masterpieces, the public and critics condemned him to failure with the absolute unanimity of mistaken occasions. 

 In 1853, in view of his failure, he wrote “Bartleby the Scrivener”, a story containing the antidote to his depression and the seed of his future movements, which, three years later, would give rise to The Confidence-Man, the story of a very special trickster (who in time would come to be associated with Duchamp) and a stunning catalogue of rough, sombre images, which appeared in April 1857 and would be the last prose work he published. 

 Melville died in 1891, forgotten. During his final thirty-four years he wrote a long poem, travel memoirs and, shortly before his death, the novel Billy Budd, another masterpiece — the pre-Kafkan story of a trial: the story of a sailor unfairly sentenced to death, sentenced as if he had to expiate the sin of having been young, brilliant and innocent — a masterpiece that would not be published until thirty-three years after his death. 

 Everything he wrote in the last thirty-four years of his life was done á la Bartleby, at a slow pace, as if he preferred not to, and in a clear act of rejecting the world that had rejected him. When I think of this act of rejection of his, I remember something Maurice Blanchot said about all those who knew, at the right time, how to reject the pleasant appearance of a flat, almost always empty, communication, which, it may be said, is so in vogue among today’s literati: “The act of rejecting is difficult and rare, though identical in each of us from the moment we have grasped it. Why difficult? Because you have to reject not only the worst, but also a reasonable appearance, an outcome that some would call happy.” 

 When Melville stopped searching for a happy outcome and stopped thinking about publishing, when he decided to behave in the manner of those beings who “prefer not to”, he spent years searching for a job, any job, to keep his family afloat. When eventually he found one — which wasn’t until 1866 — his destiny coincided with none other than that of Bartleby, his strange creature. 

Parallel lives. During the final years of his life, Melville, like Bartleby, “the last column of some ruined temple”, worked as a clerk in an untidy office in New York City. 

 Impossible not to relate the office of Bartleby’s inventor to that of Kafka and what Kafka wrote to Felice Bauer, saying that literature was excluding him from life, namely from the office. If these dramatic words have always made me laugh — more so today, when I’m in a good mood and I remember Montaigne, who remarked that our peculiar condition is that we are made as much to be laughed at as to laugh — other words addressed by Kafka to Felice Bauer, but less famous than the first, make me laugh even more. I often used to bring them to mind when I was in my office to avoid the onset of anguish: “Darling, I absolutely have to think of you wherever I am, which is why I’m writing to you at the desk of my boss, whom I’m representing at this present time.” 

 49) In his biography of Joyce, Richard Ellmann describes the following scene, which took place when Joyce was fifty and Beckett twenty-six, and which could have come straight from the theatre of the No: 

 “Beckett was addicted to silences, and so was Joyce; they engaged in conversations which consisted often of silences directed towards each other, both suffused with sadness, Beckett mostly for the world, Joyce mostly for himself. Joyce sat in his habitual posture, legs crossed, toe of the upper leg under the instep of the lower; Beckett, also tall and slender, fell into the same gesture. Joyce suddenly asked some such question as, ‘How could the idealist Hume write a history?’ Beckett replied, ‘A history of representation.’”

**

Much more than Gracq and Salinger and Pynchon, the man who called himself B. Traven was the genuine expression of what we know as “a secretive writer”. 

 Much more than Gracq, Salinger and Pynchon put together. Because B. Traven’s case is replete with exceptional nuances. To start with, we do not know where he was born, nor did he ever want to shed light on the matter. To some, the man who said he was called B. Traven was a North American novelist born in Chicago. To others, he was Otto Feige, a German writer who apparently had problems with the law because of his anarchist views. Others claimed he was really Maurice Rathenau, son of the founder of AEG, and there were even those who stated he was Kaiser Wilhelm II’s son. 

 Although he gave his first interview in 1966, the author of novels such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or The Bridge inthe Jungle insisted on the right to the secret of his private life, and so his identity continues to be a mystery. 

 “Traven’s story is the story of his denial,” Alejandro Gándara has written in his foreword to The Bridge in the Jungle. In effect, it is a story for which we do not have facts and they can’t be had, which is the only fact. Denying all past, he denied all present, meaning all presence. Traven never existed, not even for his contemporaries. He is a very peculiar writer of the No, and there is something very tragic in the force with which he rejected the invention of his identity. 

 “This secretive writer,” Walter Rehmer has said, “reflects in his absent identity all the tragic conscience of modern literature, the conscience of a writing that, once its insufficiency and impossibility have been exposed, turns this exposure into its fundamental question.” 

These words of Walter Rehmer’s — I have just realised — could also reflect my efforts in this book of notes without a text. Of them it could also be said that they bring together all or at least part of the conscience of a writing that, once its impossibility has been exposed, turns this exposure into its fundamental question. 

 In short I think Rehmer’s sentences are to the point, but, if Traven had read them, first of all he would have been amazed, and then he would have burst out laughing. In fact I am on the verge of reacting in the same way. Besides, I hate Rehmer’s essays for their solemnity. 

 To go back to Traven: the first time I heard his name was in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in a bar on the outskirts of the city. This was some years ago, when I made use of my savings to travel abroad in August. I heard Traven’s name in that bar. I had just arrived from Puerto Escondido or Hidden Port, a town that, owing to its unusual name, would have been the perfect place to hear about the most hidden writer of them all. But it wasn’t there, it was in Puerto Vallarta where I heard Traven’s story for the first time. 

 The bar in Puerto Vallarta was a few miles from the house where John Huston — who made a film of The Treasure of theSierra Madre — spent the last years of his life locked away in Las Caletas, an estate facing the sea, with the jungle behind it, a kind of port for the jungle invariably battered by the hurricanes in the gulf. 

 In his book of memoirs, Huston describes how he wrote the script of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and sent a copy to Traven, who responded with twenty pages full of detailed suggestions concerning set construction, lighting and so forth. 

 Huston was anxious to meet the mysterious writer, who at that time was already famous for concealing his real name: “I secured,” writes Huston, “a tentative promise from him to meet with me at the Hotel Bamer in Mexico City, made the trip down and waited. He didn’t show up. One morning almost a week after my arrival I woke shortly after daybreak to discover a man standing at the foot of my bed. He took out a card which read: ‘Hal Croves. Translator, Acapulco and San Antonio’.” 

 Then this man produced a letter from Traven, which Huston read while still in bed. In the letter, Traven said he was ill and had not been able to make the rendezvous, but Hal Croves was his great friend and knew as much about Traven’s work as he himself did, and so was authorised to answer any questions Huston might have. 

 Sure enough, Croves, who said he was Traven’s agent, knew everything about Traven’s work. Croves spent two weeks on the film-set, collaborating actively. He was an odd and cordial man, whose conversation was agreeable (and sometimes became endless, resembling one of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novels), though at the moment of truth his favourite topics were human pain and horror. When he left the set, Huston and his assistants began to put two and two together and realised that the agent was an impostor, the agent very probably was Traven himself. 

 When the film opened, the mystery of B. Traven’s identity fueled speculation. It was even said that a group of Honduran writers was behind the name. To Huston, Croves was undoubtedly of European origin, German or Austrian; the strange thing was that his novels recounted the experiences of an American in Western Europe, at sea and in Mexico, and were experiences that had clearly been lived. 

 The mystery of Traven’s identity fueled so much speculation that a Mexican magazine sent two reporters to shadow Croves in an attempt to ascertain who Traven’s agent really was. They found him keeping a small store on the edge of the jungle near Acapulco. They watched the store until they spotted Croves leaving to go into town. They then broke down the door and rifled his desk, where they found several manuscripts by Traven and evidence that Croves was using another name: Traven Torsvan. 

 Further investigative reporting revealed that he had a fourth name: Ret Marut, an anarchist writer who had disappeared from Germany in 1922. In 1923 Traven appeared in Mexico, so the dates fitted. Croves died in 1969, some years after marrying his assistant, Rosa Elena Lujan. A month after his death, his widow confirmed that B. Traven had been Ret Marut. 

 An elusive writer if ever there was one, Traven used an unbelievable variety of names, in fiction and in reality, to keep his own secret: Traven Torsvan, Arnolds, Traves Torsvan, Barker, Traven Torsvan Torsvan, Berick Traven, Traven Torsvan Croves, B. T. Torsvan, Ret Marut, Rex Marut, Robert Marut, Traven Robert Marut, Fred Maruth, Fred Mareth, Red Marut, Richard Maurhut, Albert Otto Max Wienecke, Adolf Rudolph Feige Kraus, Martinez, Fred Gaudet, Artum, Lainger, Goetz Ohly, Anton Räderscheidt, Robert Bek-Gran, Hugo Kronthal, Wilhelm Scheider, Heinrich Otto Becker and Otto Torsvan. 

 One of those who tried to write his biography, Jonah Raskin, almost went mad in the process. From the start he counted on the collaboration of Rosa Elena Lujan, but he soon began to understand that the widow was not entirely sure who the hell Traven was either. A stepdaughter of his managed to confuse him utterly when she claimed she remembered seeing her father talking to Mr Hal Croves. 

 Jonah Raskin finally abandoned the idea of a biography and ended up writing the story of his futile search for Traven’s real name, a wild-goose chase. Raskin chose to abandon his research when he realised his mental health was at stake: he had started dressing like Traven, wearing his glasses, calling himself Hal Croves... 

 B. Traven, the most secretive of the secret writers, reminds me of the central character in Chesterton’s The Man Who WasThursday. This novel talks of a huge and dangerous conspiracy consisting in fact of one man who, as Borges says, deceives everybody “with the aid of beards, masks and pseudonyms”. 

 85) Traven hid, I am going to hide, the sun will hide tomorrow, it’s the last total eclipse of the millennium. Already my voice is growing distant as it prepares to say it is going, going to try other places. I have only existed, the voice says, if talk of me can be talk of life. It says it is eclipsing itself, it is going, to end here would be perfect, but it wonders if this is desirable. And it answers itself that it is, that to finish here would be marvellous, perfect, whoever it is, wherever it is.

Bartleby & Co.

Enrique Vila-Matas

Some thoughts of Chomfort

To despise money is to dethrone a king.

The beginning of wisdom is the fear of man.

The world either breaks or hardens the heart.

He who has no character is not a man-he is a thing.

Love-agreeable foolery: ambition-serious stupidity.

The loves of some peoples are but the result of good suppers.

Prejudice, vanity, calculation; these are what govern the world.

The public! the public! How many fools does it take to make a public?

In politics and in gallantry really wise men do not fight for conquests.

Enjoy and give enjoyment, without injury to thyself or to others;
this is true morality.

Intelligent people make many blunders because they never be­ lieve the world as stupid as it is. 

Love pleases more than marriage for the reason that romance is more interesting than history.

You run the risk of being disgusted if you pry into the processes of cookery, government, or justice.

A man in deep mourning is asked: "Good God! whom have you lost?" "I?" says he, "I have lost nothing, I am a widower."

We have three kinds of friends; those who love us, those who are indifferent to us and those who hate us.

The best philosophy to employ towards the world is to alloy the sarcasm of gaiety with the indulgence of contempt.

In love all is true and all is false. It is the only thing on which you cannot possibly say an absurdity. 

The ambitious one who failed in his aim and lives in despair re­ minds me of Ixion broken on the wheel for having embraced a cloud.

An Englishman condemned to be hanged received the King's pardon. "The law's on my side," he protested, "they shall hang !" me.

Our happiness depends upon a multitude of circumstances which do not manifest themselves, which one does not, and can not speak of.

We may wager that any idea of the public, or any general opin­ ion, is a folly since it has received the approbation of a majority of the people.

"The difference between you and me," said a philosopher, "is that you say to masked hypocrites 'I know you' while I leave them to think that they have deceived me."

Someone asked a child "Is God the Father, God?" "Yes."-"And God the Son, is He God?" "Not yet, that I know of; but on the death of His father He cannot fail to come into the succession."

Mr. L. to turn Mrs. B. (for long a widow) from the idea of mar­rying, said to her "Don't you see, it's a grand thing to bear the name of a man who can commit no more stupidities."

Hope is but a quack who cheats us continually and I for one felt happy when I had lost my hopes.

I should put on the gates of Paradise the words which Dante put over the entrance to Hell: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

The physical world appears to be the work of a powerful and good being, who has been obliged to leave the execution of a part of his scheme to a demon; but the moral world seems to be the product of the whims of a demon gone mad.

Milton after the restoration of Charles II was on the way to se­ curing again a lucrative office which he had lost. His wife urged him. He replied: "You are a woman, and you want a coach; as for me, I want to live and die an honest man."

Someone told M. "You are very fond of consideration." He re­ plied in a way that struck me: "No, I have consideration for my­ self and that sometimes secures me the consideration of others."

A bright woman told me once that when choosing a sweetheart a woman pays more regard to what other women say about the man of her choice than to her own opinion of him.

One must be able to combine the contraries: love of virtue with indifference for public opinion: taste for work with indifference for glory: the care of one's health with indifference for life.

When one has been tormented and fatigued by his sensitiveness, he learns that be must live from day to day, forget all that is pos­sible, and efface his life from memory as it passes.

A man passed all his evenings for 30 years with a lady other than his wife. He finally lost his wife; one believed be would marry the other, and recommended him to do so. He refused. "I should not know," said he "where to go to pass my evenings."

I asked R., a man full of wit and talent, why he had shown him­self so little in the revolution of 1789. He replied: "It was be­ cause, for 30 years, I had found men so wicked privately and individually, that I did not dare to hope any good of them in public and taken collectively."

A young man asked me why Mrs. B. had refused the homage he offered, to run after Mr. L. who seemed to refuse her advances. I told him: "My dear friend, Genoa, rich and powerful, offered its sovereignty to several kings, who all refused it; yet they went to war to possess Corsica, which produces nothing except chest­ nuts, but which was proud and independent."

Rousseau, it is said, had been favoured by the Countess of Bouf­flers, and had even gone so far as to neglect her, which put them in a bad temper with one another. One day someone remarked in their presence that the love of the human race extinguishes love of country. "For my part," said she, "I judge by myself and I feel it is not true. I am a very good Frenchwoman, and I none the less interest myself in the happiness of all." "Yes, I understand you,'' said Rousseau, "you are French at heart, and cosmopolitan as regards the rest of your person."

Chamfort - The Cynic’s Breviary

NATURE has not said to me: Be not poor; still less: Be rich. But she cries out to me: Be independent.

 “The difference between you and myself,” said a friend to me, “is that you have said to all the masqueraders: ‘I know you,’ whilst I have left them the hope that they are deceiving me. That is why the world favours me more than you. It is a masked ball, the interest of which you have spoiled for others and the amusement for yourself.”

A man of wit is lost, if to his wit he does not join energy of character. If you have the lantern of Diogenes, you must also have his cudgel.

There are more fools than wise men, and even in the wise man himself there is more folly than wisdom.

The worst wasted of all days is that during which one has not laughed.

The best philosophical attitude to adopt towards the world is a union of the sarcasm of gaiety with the indulgence of contempt.

We must be just before being generous, as we must possess shirts before having lace embroideries.

Education must have two foundations—morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defence for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists. The one great social principle is to be just both to yourself and to others. If you must love your neighbour as yourself, it is at least as fair to love yourself as your neighbour.

Public opinion is a jurisdiction which the honest man must never fully recognize, and which he must never ignore.

It must be admitted that to live in the world without from time to time acting a part is impossible. What distinguishes the honest man from the knave is, that the former only does so when absolutely obliged and to escape a danger, while the latter seeks for opportunities.

A man who is not only honest but wise owes it to himself to add to the prudence that satisfies his conscience, the prudence that foresees and disarms calumny.

I cannot conceive of a wisdom that lacks distrust: according to the Scriptures the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God—I believe it is rather the fear of men.

We must needs have the power of uniting contrarieties: love of virtue with indifference to public opinion, taste for work with indifference to glory, attention to health with indifference to life.

There are few vices that prevent a man from having many friends so much as his too high qualities prevent him.

Vanity is often the motive that forces a man to summon up all the energy of his soul. Wood added to a steel point makes a dart, two feathers added to the wood make an arrow.

A man of no principles is also, as a rule, a man of no character, for had he been born with character, he would have felt the need of forming principles.

Nearly all men are slaves for the same reason that the Spartans assigned for the servitude of the Persians—lack of power to pronounce the syllable, No. To be able to utter that word and live alone, are the only two means to preserve one’s freedom and one’s character.

What I have learnt I no longer know; what I still know has come to me by intuition.

Man can aspire to virtue; he cannot reasonably aim at finding truth.

Man reaches each stage in his life as a novice.

The majority of human beings in the world pass their lives in it so heedlessly and think so little, that they do not know that world which they have before their eyes every day. They do not, M. de B. wittily remarked, for the same reason that cockchafers have no acquaintance with natural history.

’Tis not generally known how much wit a man requires to avoid being ridiculous.

“Are you not ashamed to wish to speak better than you can?” said Seneca to one of his sons who could not work out the exordium of an oration he was composing. One might say the same to those who adopt principles stronger than their character will bear. “Are you not ashamed of wishing to be more of a philosopher than you can be?” 

In great actions men show themselves as they ought to be, in small actions as they are. 

 Vain is equivalent to empty; thus vanity is so miserable a thing, that one cannot give it a worse name than its own. It proclaims itself for what it is. 

 He is far advanced in the study of morals who can lay his finger on all the points that distinguish pride from vanity. The first is lofty, calm, dignified, imperturbable, resolute; the second mean, inconstant, easily swayed, restless, unsteady. One raises a man, the other puffs him up. The first is source of a thousand virtues, the second that of nearly all vices and all caprices. There is a kind of pride in which are comprised all the commandments of God, a kind of vanity that embodies the seven deadly sins. 

Celebrity: the advantage of being known to those who do not know you. 

The love of glory a virtue! A strange virtue truly, that calls to its aid the co-operation of all the vices, that finds stimulants in ambition, envy, vanity, sometimes even avarice! Would Titus have been Titus had he had as his ministers Sejanus, Narcissus, and Tigellinus? 

 In order to forgive reason for the evil it has wrought on the majority of men, we must imagine for ourselves what man would be without his reason. ’Tis a necessary evil. 

 Thought consoles us for all, and heals all. If at times it does you ill, ask it for the remedy for that ill and it will give it you. 

 That to feel makes one think is pretty generally admitted; that to think makes one feel finds less acceptance, but is almost as true. 

 The intelligence is often to the heart what the library of a mansion is to the person of its master. 

 A bad man will occasionally do a good action. One might say that he wishes to see whether it gives as much pleasure as honest folk assert. 

 Stupidity would not be absolute stupidity did it not fear intelligence. Vice would not be absolute vice did it not hate virtue. 

 One suspects the idleness of a knave and the silence of a fool. 

 Generosity is the pitifulness of noble hearts. 

 All passions are exaggerated, otherwise they would not be passions. 

“The manner in which I see you distributing praise and blame,” said M. de B—— to a friend, “would make the best man in the world anxious to be defamed.” 

 Fals modesty is the most decent of all deceptions. 

 There are certain failings that preserve one from some epidemic vices, just as it may be noted that in time of plague fever-stricken patients escape contagion. 

 The philosopher who would fain extinguish his passions resembles the chemist who would like to let his furnace go out. 

 One of the great misfortunes of man is that even his good qualities are sometimes useless to him, and that the art of profiting by them and governing them wisely is often the tardy fruit of experience alone. 

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource. 

Hope is but a charlatan that ceases not to deceive us. For myself happiness only began when I had lost it. I would fain inscribe upon the gate of Paradise the line that Dante wrote upon that of Hell—“Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.” 

Our reason sometimes makes us as unhappy as our passions, and in such a case one can say of a man that he is a patient poisoned by his physician. 

It is nature’s will that wise men have their illusions as well as fools, to the end that they be not made too unhappy by their own wisdom. 

That tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Bible is a fine allegory. Is it not intended to signify that when one has penetrated to the depths of things, the consequent loss of illusions brings about the death of the soul—that is to say a complete detachment from all that moves and interests other men? 

The physical world appears the work of a good and mighty Being who has had to abandon the execution of part of his plan to a maleficent Being. But the moral world seems rather the production of a crazy fiend’s caprices. 

When I hear it argued that, taking everything into account, the least sensitive folk are the happiest, I remember the Indian proverb: “Better to be seated than standing, better to be lying than seated, but better than all else to be dead.” 

Living is a disease from the pains of which sleep eases us every sixteen hours; sleep is but a palliative, death alone is the cure. 

Time diminishes for us the intensity of absolute pleasures, to use the metaphysician’s term, but apparently it increases relative pleasures; and I suspect that this is the artifice by which nature is able to attach men to life after the loss of the objects or pleasures which most rendered it agreeable. 

Some one described Providence as the baptismal name of chance; no doubt some pious person will retort that chance is the nickname of Providence. 

M. —— said to me, à propos of his constant offences against digestion, and of the pleasures in which he indulged—the only obstacles to his regaining his health: “I should be marvellously well if it were not for myself.” 

Nature seems to make use of men for the accomplishment of her designs without concerning herself about her instruments, like tyrants who rid themselves of those who have been of service to them. 

There is no need to regard Burrhus as an absolutely virtuous man; he is only so, contrasted with Narcissus. Seneca and Burrhus are the honest men of an age in which there are none. 

In order to sum up in a single word the rarity of honest folk, a friend remarked to me that in society the honest man is a variety of the human species. 

I used to know a misanthrope who in his good-humoured moments would say: “I should not be at all surprised if there were an honest man hidden away in some corner without any one knowing of him.” 

The thrifty man is the richest, the miser the poorest of men. 

An empty-headed fellow who has a passing flash of wit astonishes and scandalises one as does a cab horse at a gallop. 

I should advise any one who wishes to obtain a favour of a minister to accost him with an air of melancholy rather than one of gaiety. We do not like to see others happier than ourselves. 

He that is precisely midway between our enemy and ourselves seems to us nearer our enemy; this is but an effect of optical laws, like that by which the jet of a fountain seems less distant from the other side of the basin than from that where we are standing. 

It was said of a man who was always conjuring up gloomy chimæras and saw only the dark side of everything: “He builds dungeons in Spain.” 

Madame de Rochefort was asked if she were anxious to know the future. “No,” she replied, “it is too like the past.” 

The new friends whom we make after attaining a certain age and by whom we would fain replace those whom we have lost, are to our old friends what glass eyes, false teeth and wooden legs are to real eyes, natural teeth and legs of flesh and bone. 

By learning the evil elements in nature we despise death, by learning those of society we despise life. 

Society would be a charming affair if we were only interested in one another. 

“In the world,” remarked some one to me, “you have three kinds of friends: the friends who love you, the friends who do not trouble their heads about you, and the friends who hate you.” 

It must be admitted that in order to live happy in the world there are sides to the soul which we must absolutely paralyse. 

Man under present social conditions seems to me corrupted more by his reason than by his passions. His passions—I mean those that characterise the primitive man—have preserved for society the few natural elements it still possesses. 

Speaking generally, were society not an artificial structure, every simple and genuine feeling would not produce the great effect it does; it would give pleasure without surprise, but, as a matter of fact, it both surprises and pleases. Our surprise is a satire on society, our pleasure an act of homage to nature. 

Often man lives by himself and he has need of virtue; he lives with others and he has need of honour. 

Are you the friend of a gentleman about the Court, of a man of quality, as the saying is, and do you wish to inspire in him the warmest affection of which the human heart is capable? If so, do not confine yourself to lavishing on him the tenderest cares of friendship, to helping him out of his troubles, consoling him in affliction, consecrating your every moment to him, saving on occasion his life or his honour. Do not waste your time on such trifles; do more, do better—work out his genealogical tree. 

There is a wide-spread belief that the art of pleasing is a valuable means of making one’s fortune. But to know how to be bored is an art which gives far better results; indeed talent for making a fortune like that for succeeding with women, can almost be reduced to that art. 

The great always sell their society to the vanity of the little. 

A philosopher who had retired from the world wrote me a letter full of good advice and common sense. It concluded with these words: “Farewell, my friend; maintain if you can the interests that bind you to society, but cultivate the feelings that cut you away from it.” 

Such is the miserable condition of men, that they must needs seek consolation in society for the evils of nature, and in nature for the evils of society. How many have failed to find either in one or the other distraction from their troubles! 

M. —— was reproached for his love of solitude. “You see,” he said, “I am more accustomed to my own failings than to those of other people.” 

Weakness of character or lack of ideas, in a word all that can withhold us from living a solitary life, are things that preserve many a man from misanthropy. 

“Why Madame de L. should be so anxious for me to visit her,” said a friend to me, “I do not know, for when some time has elapsed without my going I despise her less.” The same might be said of the world in general. 

I asked M. N—— why he had ceased to go into society. “Because,” he replied, “I no longer love the women and I know the men.” 

Society, what people call the world, is nothing more than the war of a thousand petty opposed interests, an eternal strife of all the vanities, which, turn in turn wounded and humiliated one by the other, intercross, come into collision, and on the morrow expiate the triumph of the eve in the bitterness of defeat. To live alone, to remain unjostled in this miserable struggle, where for a moment one draws the eyes of the spectators, to be crushed a moment later—this is what is called being a nonentity, having no existence. Poor humanity! 

What makes the success of many books consists in the affinity there is between the mediocrity of the author’s ideas and those of the public. 

The majority of the books of our time give one the impression of having been manufactured in a day out of books read the day before. 

There are well-dressed foolish ideas just as there are well-dressed fools. 

It is when their age of passions is past that great men produce their masterpieces, just as it is after volcanic eruptions that the soil is most fertile. 

The tragic drama has the great moral drawback of attaching too high an importance to life and death. 

Speron-Speroni admirably explains how it is that an author who, in his own opinion, delivers himself clearly, is sometimes obscure to his reader. “It is because,” he says, “the author proceeds from the thought to the expression, the reader from the expression to the thought.” 

A man is not clever simply because he has many ideas, just as he is not necessarily a good general because he has many soldiers. 

A poetaster asked Chamfort’s opinion on a couplet. “Excellent,” he said, “were it not for its length.” 

Some one has said that to plagiarise from the ancients is to play the pirate beyond the Equator, but that to steal from the moderns is to pick pockets at street corners. 

An interesting work might be compiled which would point out all the noxious ideas concerning the human spirit, society and morality, to be found argued or implicit in the most celebrated writings and the most highly revered authors; ideas which propagate religious superstition, evil political principles, despotism, class pride and popular prejudices of every kind. Such a work would demonstrate that nearly all books corrupt, and that the best do almost as much harm as good. 

There are two classes of moralists and political writers; those who have only seen human nature on its detestable or absurd side, and they form the greater number: Lucian, Montaigne, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Swift, Mandeville, Helvetius, &c.; those who have only seen it on its finer side and in its perfection like Shaftesbury and some others. The first know nothing of the palace, the pig-sties of which are all that they have seen; the second are enthusiasts, who turn their eyes far from all that offends them, but that, nonetheless, exists. Est in medio verum. 

Physical scourges and the calamities of human nature rendered society necessary. Society has added to natural misfortunes. The drawbacks of society have made government necessary, and government adds to society’s misfortunes. There is the history of human nature in a nutshell. 

Men’s ideas are like cards and other games. Ideas which I remember to have seen regarded as dangerous and over-bold have since become commonplace and almost trite, and have descended to men little worthy of them. So it is that some of the ideas which to-day we call audacious will be considered feeble and conventional by our descendants. 

It has been observed that writers on physics, natural history, physiology, and chemistry, are, as a rule, men of mild, equable temperament and happy; whilst, on the contrary, writers on politics, law, and even ethics, are of a sad and melancholy cast of mind. Nothing can be more simple: the former study nature, the latter society, the former contemplate the work of the supreme Being, the latter confine their gaze to the work of men. The respective results must needs be diverse. 

Said a witty misanthrope to me à propos of the iniquities of men, “It is only the uselessness of the first Deluge that preserves us from being visited by a second.” 

There are periods when public opinion is the worst of opinions. 

The majority of our social institutions seem to have as object the maintenance of man in a mediocrity of ideas and emotions, which renders him best fitted to govern or be governed. 

There is no man who can be by himself alone so contemptible as a body of men, and there is no body of men that can be so contemptible as the public at large. 

It may be argued that every public idea, every accepted convention, is a piece of stupidity, for has it not commended itself to the greatest number?

The public is governed as it reasons. It is its right to say foolish things, as it is that of the ministers to do them.

A certain witty advocate remarked: “One would risk being disgusted if one saw politics, justice, and one’s dinner in the making.” 

’Tis easier to make certain things legal than to make them legitimate. 

Experience which enlightens private persons corrupts princes and officials. 

Had any one told Adam, on the day following the death of Abel, that some centuries later there would be places where, in an enclosure of twelve square miles, seven or eight hundred thousand people would be concentrated, piled one upon another, do you imagine he would have believed it possible that such multitudes could ever live together? Would he not have conceived an idea of the crimes and monstrosities that would be committed under such conditions much more terrible than the reality has proved? This is a point we ought to bear in mind, as a consolation for the drawbacks of these extraordinary assemblages of human beings. 

Were a historian like Tacitus to write a history of the best of our kings, giving an exact account of all the tyrannical acts and abuses of authority, the majority of which lie buried in the profoundest obscurity, there would be few reigns which would not inspire us with the same horror as that of Tiberius. 

Often in early youth an opinion or custom seems absurd to us, which, with advancing years, we discover has some justification and so appears less absurd. Ought we to conclude from this that certain customs are not so ridiculous as others? One might sometimes be tempted to think that they were established by people who had read the book of life through, and that they are judged by those who, despite their intelligence, have only glanced at a few pages. 

Like animals that cannot breathe at a certain altitude without perishing, the slave dies in the atmosphere of freedom. 

It is unfortunate for men, fortunate perhaps for tyrants, that the poor and unhappy have not the instinct or pride of the elephant which does not reproduce itself in servitude. 

There is no history worthy attention save that of free nations; the history of nations under the sway of despotism is no more than a collection of anecdotes. 

Will it be believed that despotism has its partizans on the ground of the necessity for encouraging the fine arts? The brilliancy of the reign of Louis XIV. has to an incredible extent multiplied the number of those who think thus. According to them the crowning glory of all human society is to have fine tragedies, fine comedies and other works of art. There are those who willingly forgive all the evil wrought by priests, since without the priests we should not have had the comedy of Tartuffe. 

What is a cardinal? He is a priest clad in scarlet, who receives a hundred thousand crowns from the king, to flout him in the name of the pope. 

Society is composed of two great classes—those who have more dinners than appetite, and those who have more appetite than dinners. 

Change in fashion is the tax which the industry of the poor levies on the vanity of the rich. 

It is an incontestable fact that there are in France seven million folk who beg for alms, and another twelve millions who are too poor to give them. 

The nobility, say the nobles, is an intermediary between the king and the people…. Precisely; just as the hound is the intermediary between the huntsman and the hares.   

France is a country where it is often useful to exhibit one’s vices, and invariably dangerous to exhibit one’s virtues. 

A friend said to me à propos of some ridiculous ministerial blunders: “If it were not for the government, we should have nothing left to laugh at in France.” 

In France we leave unmolested those who set fire to the house and persecute those who sound the alarm bell. 

Paris is a city of gaieties and pleasures, where four fifths of the inhabitants die of grief. 

When princes condescend to emerge from their miserable systems of etiquette it is never in favour of a man of merit, but of a wench or a buffoon. When women forget themselves it is never for love of an honest man but of a rascal. In short when people break the yoke of public opinion, it is rarely to rise above it, nearly always to descend below it. 

One must make choice between loving women and knowing them; there is no middle course. 

Naturalists tell us that in all animal species degeneration begins in the female. In civilised society philosophers can apply this observation to morals. 

Apparently nature, in giving man an absolutely irradicable taste for women, must have foreseen that, without this precaution, the contempt inspired by the vices of their sex, vanity in particular, would be a great obstacle to the maintenance and propagation of the human species. 

A man who professed to esteem women highly was asked if he had enjoyed the favours of many. “Not so many as if I had despised them,” he said. 

Whatever evil a man may think of women, there is no woman but thinks more. 

Young women have a misfortune which they share with kings, that of having no friends; but happily they feel this misfortune as little as the kings: the latter’s pomp and the former’s vanity spare both that emotion. 

Madame de Montmorin said to her son: “You are going into society: I have only one piece of advice to give you, and that is to be in love with all the women.” 

A witty woman told me one day what may well be the secret of her sex: it is that every woman in choosing a lover takes more account of the way in which other women regard the man than of her own. 

The woman who esteems herself more for her gifts of soul or intelligence than for her beauty is above her sex. She who esteems herself more for her beauty than for her intelligence or soul is of her sex. But she who esteems herself more for her birth or rank than for her beauty is outside her sex, beneath it. 

Madame de Talmont, seeing M. de Richelieu neglecting her to pay attentions to Madame de Brionne, a very beautiful woman, but said to be rather stupid, remarked to him: “You are not blind, Marshall, but I cannot help thinking you a little deaf.” 

Mademoiselle Duthé having lost a lover, and the affair causing some talk, a man who called to see her found her playing the harp, and said with surprise: “Good heavens! I was expecting to find you desolated with grief.” “Ah,” she exclaimed in a pathetic tone, “you ought to have seen me yesterday!” 

A woman was at a performance of the tragedy of Mérope, and did not weep: surprise was expressed. “I could cry my eyes out,” she said, “but I have to go out to supper to-night.” 

A young man was advised to ask a woman of forty, with whom he had been head over ears in love, to return his letters. “I don’t suppose she has them any longer,” he said. “Oh yes,” was the reply, “about the age of thirty women begin to keep their love letters.” 

“He who has not seen much of demi-mondaines does not understand women at all,” gravely remarked to me a fond admirer of his own wife, who was unfaithful to him. 

I remember to have seen a man forsaking the society of ballet girls because, so he said, he had found them as deceitful as honest women. 

Someone remarked of a lady who was not venal, followed her heart’s promptings, and remained faithful to the object of her choice, “She is a charming woman and lives as virtuously as is possible outside marriage and celibacy.” 

Women only give to friendship what they borrow from love. 

Love as it exists in society is nothing more than the exchange of two fancies and the contact of two epidermes. 

Duclos was speaking one day of the paradise that everyone imagines for himself in his own way. “Here are the ingredients for yours, Duclos,” said Madame de Rochefort; “Wine, bread, and cheese, and the first woman who might come on the scene.” 

Apparently love does not seek real perfections—one might say it fears them. It only loves those which it creates or supposes, and so resembles those monarchs who only recognise the great things they themselves have achieved. 

A man in love who pities the reasonable man seems to me like one who reads fairy tales and jeers at those who read history. 

Love resembles epidemic diseases: the more one fears them, the more liable is one to infection. 

In witnessing or experiencing the pains inseparable from intense feeling in love and friendship, be it by the death of the loved person or by the accidents of life, one is tempted to believe that dissipation and frivolity are not such great follies after all, and that life is scarce worth more than what fashionable folk make of it. 

Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame. 

Love gives greater pleasure than marriage for the same reason that romances are more amusing than history. 

One of the best reasons you can have for never marrying is not so much that you are the woman’s dupe as that she is not yours. 

Both marriage and celibacy have their respective drawbacks: we shall be wise if we make choice of that which is not irremediable. 

For thirty years a certain man went to spend every evening with Mme. ——. When his wife died his friends believed he would marry the other, and urged him to do so. “No, no,” he said, “if I did, where should I have to spend my evenings?” 

I was sitting at dinner beside a man who asked me if the lady opposite him was the wife of the gentleman at her side. I had noticed that the latter had not exchanged a word with his neighbour, so I replied: “He either does not know her or else she is his wife.” 

Lord Bolingbroke gave Louis XIV. a thousand proofs of affectionate attention during a very dangerous illness. The king with some astonishment remarked: “I am the more touched by it because you English do not love kings.” “Sire,” replied Bolingbroke, “we are like those husbands who, having no love for their own wives, are only the more eager to please those of their neighbours.” 

To turn a widow from the idea of marrying again, one of her friends remarked to her: “Don’t you see that it is a very fine thing to bear the name of a man who can no longer make a fool of himself?” 

The sincerest of affections lays the soul open to petty passions. Marriage makes your soul liable to your wife’s petty passions also, ambition, vanity, and the like. 

La Gabrielli, a celebrated singer, having asked 5,000 ducats from the Empress of Russia as her fee for singing at St. Petersburg for two months, the latter replied: “I pay none of my field marshalls on that scale.” “In that case,” said La Gabrielli, “Your Majesty has only to make your field marshalls sing.” The Empress paid the 5,000 ducats without further demur. 

A print-seller asked, on June 25th, a high price for a portrait of Madame Lamotte, who had been flogged and branded on the 21st, giving as his reason that it was a proof before letters. 

An entertainment manager was asking M. de Villars to waive the right of free admission for the king’s pages. “You must observe, my lord,” he said, “that several pages make a volume.” 

Marshall de Biron had a very dangerous illness; he wished to confess himself, and said before several of his friends: “What I owe to God, what I owe to the king, what I owe to the State—” “Hush, hush,” interrupted one of his friends, “you will die insolvent.” 

Some young courtiers were supping with M. de Conflans. The first song of the evening was broad but not too improper. Immediately thereafter, however, M. de Fronsac rose and sang some abominable couplets which amazed the company, gay as it was. There was a dead silence, broken by M. de Conflans, who observed: “Fronsac, you surprise me! There are ten bottles of champagne between that song and the first.” 

A woman of ninety said to M. de Fontenelle, then ninety-five: “Death has forgotten us.” “Hush!” replied M. de Fontenelle, putting his finger to his lips. 

To obtain dry weather, it was arranged to have a procession with the shrine of St. Geneviève. Scarcely had the cortege started, however, than it began to rain. On which the Bishop of Castres wittily remarked: “The saint is mistaken—she believes we are asking her for rain.” 

I once heard an orthodox person denouncing those who discuss articles of faith. “Gentlemen,” he said naïvely, “a true Christian does not examine what he is ordered to believe. Dogma is like a bitter pill: if you chew it, you will never be able to swallow it.” 

M. de —— asked a certain bishop for a country house of his which he never occupied. “Don’t you know,” said the bishop, “that a man ought always to have some place to which he never goes, but where he believes he would be happy?” “Yes,” replied M. de ——, “it is quite true—that is what has made the fortune of Paradise.” 

Rulhière said to him one day: “I have only been guilty of one baseness all my life.” “When will it end?” asked Chamfort.