(2.) A lofty birth or a large fortune portend merit, and cause it to be the sooner noticed.
(3.) The ambition of a coxcomb is excusable, because, after he has made a large fortune, people will be careful to discover in him some merit which he never had before, and as great as it is in his own opinion.
(4.) As favour and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.
(5.) We could never imagine what a strange disproportion a few or a great many pieces of money make between men, if we did not see it every day with our own eyes.
Those few or many pieces of money are what determine men to adopt the profession of arms, of the law, or of the church, for they have hardly any other vocation.
(6.) Two merchants were neighbours and in the same line of business, but their success in life was quite different. They each had a daughter; and these, brought up together, had been as intimate as girls of the same age and the same condition in life could have been; later, one of them, driven by want and misery, endeavoured to get a place, and entered the service of a great lady, one of the highest rank at court;[256] and this same lady had formerly been her bosom friend.
(7.) If a financier fails in making a lucky stroke, the courtiers say of him, “He is a mere citizen, a man sprung from nothing, a boor;” but if he succeeds, they become suitors for his daughterʼs hand.
(8.) Some men in their youth serve an apprenticeship to a certain trade, to follow a very different one the rest of their lives.[257]
(9.) A man is very plain-looking, dwarfish in size, and wanting in intelligence;[258] but some one whispers to me that he has an annual income of fifty thousand livres. That concerns him alone, and I shall never be the better or the worse for it; but people might well consider me mad if I were to look on such a man in a different light because he is wealthy, and were to do so involuntarily.
(10.) It is in vain to attempt to turn a very rich blockhead into ridicule, for the laughers will be on his side.