[2] Religion is a matter between each man and the Divinity. By what right do you come and place yourself between my God and me? I accept a proctor appointed by the social contract only in those matters which I cannot do myself.
Why should not a Frenchman pay his priest like his baker? If we have good bread in Paris, the reason is that the State has not yet ventured to declare the provision of bread gratuitous and put all the bakers at the charge of the Treasury.
In the United States every man pays his own priest. These gentry are compelled to have some merit, and my neighbour does not see good to make his happiness depend on submitting me to his priest. (Letters of Birkbeck.)
What will happen if I have the conviction, as our fathers did, that my priest is the intimate ally of my bishop? Without a Luther, there will be no more Catholicism in France in 1850. That religion could only be saved in 1820 by M. Grégoire[(49)]: see how he is treated.
[3] See the Generals of 1795.
[4] As regards the arts, here we have the great defect of a reasonable government as well as the sole reasonable eulogy of monarchy à la Louis XIV. Look at the literary sterility of America. Not a single romance like those of Robert Burns or the Spaniards of the thirteenth century. See the admirable romances of the modern Greeks, those of the Spaniards and Danes of the thirteenth century, and still better, the Arabic poetry of the seventh century.
[5] My dear pupil, your father loves you; this makes him give me forty francs a month to teach you mathematics, drawing—in a word, how to earn your living. If you were cold, because your overcoat was too small, your father would be unhappy. He would be unhappy because he would sympathise, etc., etc. But when you are eighteen, you yourself will have to earn the money needed to buy your overcoat. Your father, I have heard, has an income of twenty-five thousand francs, but there are four of you children; therefore you will have to accustom yourself to do without the carriage you enjoy while you live with your father, etc., etc.
[6] Yesterday evening I listened to two charming little girls of four years old singing very gay love-songs in a swing which I was pushing. The maidservants teach them these songs and their mother tells them that "love" and "lover" are words without any meaning.