[33] D'OÙ VIENT PRÉFÉRER CELUI-CI. See le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard, note 220.
[34] ARRÊTÉ, for the modern French engagé ('engaged').
[35] IL ME TARDE, 'I long.'
[36] EN PASSE, 'In a position to.'
[37] D'ALLER À TOUT. For the more modern expression d'arriver à tout, 'to attain any height.'
[38] DÉFAITE, 'Excuse' or 'pretext' (Littré", 4°, also Diet, de l'Acad. 1878).
[39] ÉLÉVATION. Used here with the unusual meaning of 'desire for social eminence.'
[40] ELLE S'ENDORT DANS CET ÉTAT, 'She is satisfied with her condition.' While already in the seventeenth century the ambition of rich bourgeois to gain admission to the exclusive circles of the nobility had been sufficiently marked to induce Molière to attack it in his Bourgeois gentilhomme, it was even more noticeable in the eighteenth, and mésalliances between noblemen and women of the middle class became much more frequent.
[41] RÉFLEXION ROTURIÈRE. Roture was the expression used to denote the bourgeoisie as distinguished from the nobility.
[42] JE N'Y ENTENDS POINT DE FINESSE, 'I cannot enter into such subtle distinctions on the question of happiness.' She refuses to discuss the possibility of Araminte's preferring happiness to rank. For her, rank means happiness, as would wealth.