The sincerest of affections lays the soul open to petty passions. Marriage makes your soul liable to your wife’s petty passions; also, ambition, vanity, and the like.
La Gabrielli, a celebrated singer, having asked 5,000 ducats from the Empress of Russia as her fee for singing at St. Petersburg for two months, the latter replied: “I pay none of my field marshals on that scale.” “In that case,” said La Gabrielli, “Your Majesty has only to make your field marshals sing.” The Empress paid the 5,000 ducats without further demur.
A print-seller asked, on June 25th, a high price for a portrait of Madame Lamotte, who had been flogged and branded on the 21st, giving as his reason that it was a proof before letters.
An entertainment manager was asking M. de Villars to waive the right of free admission for the king’s pages. “You must observe, my lord,” he said, “that several pages make a volume.”
Marshall de Biron had a very dangerous illness; he wished to confess himself, and said before several of his friends: “What I owe to God, what I owe to the king, what I owe to the State—” “Hush, hush,” interrupted one of his friends, “you will die insolvent.”