61.
“Une intelligence supérieure n’enfante pas le mal sans douleur, parceque ce n’est pas son fruit naturel, et qu’elle ne devait pas le porter.”
62.
Madame de Coeslin (whom he describes as an impersonation of aristocratic morgue and all the pretension and prejudices of the ancien régime), “lisant dans un journal la mort de plusieurs rois, elle ôta ses lunettes et dit en se mouchant, ‘Il y a donc une épizootie sur ces bêtes à couronne!”
I once counted among my friends an elderly lady of high rank, who had spent the whole of a long life in intimacy with royal and princely personages. In three different courts she had filled offices of trust and offices of dignity. In referring to her experience she never either moralised or generalised; but her scorn of “ces bêtes à couronne,” was habitually expressed with just such a cool epigrammatic bluntness as that of Madame de Coeslin.
63.
“L’aristocratie a trois âges successifs; l’âge des supériorités, l’âge des priviléges, l’âge des vanités; sortie du premier, elle dégénère dans le second et s’éteint dans le dernier.”
In Germany they are still in the first epoch. In England we seem to have arrived at the second. In France they are verging on the third.
64.
Chateaubriand says of himself:—