All menʼs misfortunes proceed from their aversion to being alone; hence gambling, extravagance, dissipation, wine, women, ignorance, slander, envy, and forgetfulness of what we owe to God and ourselves.
(100.) Men are sometimes unbearable to themselves; darkness and solitude unsettle them, and throw them into a state of imaginary dread and groundless terror; at such a time the least harm that can befall them is a lassitude of everything.
(101.) Idleness is the mother of listlessness, and chiefly induces men to hunt after diversions, gambling, and company. He who loves work requires nothing else.
(102.) Most men employ the first years of their life in making the last miserable.
(103.) There are some works which begin with the first letter of the alphabet and end with the last; good, bad, and indifferent things are all inserted; nothing of a certain nature is forgotten; and these, though made up of far-fetched jokes and affectations, are called “sports of wit.”[564] The same kind of sport also rules our conduct; a certain matter once commenced must be finished, and we have to go on till the end. It would have been much better to alter our plan or entirely to drop it; but it is far more odd and difficult to proceed with it, and therefore we go on, and are stimulated by contradiction; vanity encourages us, and takes the place of reason, which abandons and leaves us. Such eccentricity is even carried on in the most virtuous actions, and often in some of a religious nature.
(104.) To do our duty is an effort to us, because when we do it we only perform our obligations, and seldom receive those eulogies which are the greatest incentive to commendable actions, and support us in our enterprises. N ... loves to make a display of his charity, so he is appointed a superintendent of a charity-board, and a steward to its revenues, whilst his house becomes a public office for the distribution of them;[565] his doors are open to all clergymen or to Sisters of Charity;[566] and every one sees and talks about his liberality in relieving the poor. Who would dare to imagine N ... was not an honest man, unless it were his creditors?
(105.) Géronte dies of mere decrepitude, and without having made the will he intended to make for those last thirty years; as he died intestate, about half a score of relatives share his estate among them. For a long time he was only kept alive through the care taken of him by his wife, Asteria, who, though young, always attended on him, never let him go out of her sight, nursed him in his old age, and at last closed his eyes. He has not left her money enough to rid her of the necessity of taking another old man for a husband.
(106.) When people are loth to sell or give up their posts and offices, even when in extreme old age, it is a token they are possessed of the notion that they are immortal; or if they think they may die, it is a sign they love nobody but themselves.[567]
(107.) Faustus is a rake, a prodigal, a free-thinker, as well as ungrateful and passionate; yet his uncle Aurelius neither hates him nor disinherits him.
Frontin, his other nephew, after twenty years of acknowledged honesty and of blind complacency for the old man, never gained his favour; and the only legacy left to him is a small pension, which Faustus, the sole heir, has to pay him.