"Beat me—but be healthy and full fed!" is what we ought to say.
February, 1878.
THE CONTENTED MAN
Along a street of the capital is skipping a man who is still young.—His movements are cheerful, alert; his eyes are beaming, his lips are smiling, his sensitive face is pleasantly rosy…. He is all contentment and joy.
What has happened to him? Has he come into an inheritance? Has he been elevated in rank? Is he hastening to a love tryst? Or, simply, has he breakfasted well, and is it a sensation of health, a sensation of full-fed strength which is leaping for joy in all his limbs? Or they may have hung on his neck thy handsome, eight-pointed cross, O Polish King Stanislaus!
No. He has concocted a calumny against an acquaintance, he has assiduously disseminated it, he has heard it—that same calumny—from the mouth of another acquaintance—and has believed it himself.
Oh, how contented, how good even at this moment is that nice, highly-promising young man.
February, 1878.
THE RULE OF LIFE
"If you desire thoroughly to mortify and even to injure an opponent," said an old swindler to me, "reproach him with the very defect or vice of which you feel conscious in yourself.—Fly into a rage … and reproach him!