LXXXV
The immense respect for money, which is the first and foremost vice of Englishmen and Italians, is less felt in France and reduced to perfectly rational limits in Germany.
LXXXVI
French women, having never known the happiness of true passion, are anything but exacting over internal domestic happiness and the everyday side of life. (Compiègne.)
LXXXVII
"You talk to me of ambition for driving away boredom," said Kamensky: "but all the time I used to gallop a couple of leagues every evening, for the pleasure of seeing the Princess at Kolich, I was on terms of intimacy with a despot whom I respected, who had my whole good fortune in his power and the satisfaction of all my possible desires."
LXXXVIII
Pretty contrast! On the one hand—perfection in the little niceties of worldly wisdom and of dress, great kindliness, want of genius, daily cult of a thousand and one petty observances, and incapacity for three days' attention to the same event: on the other—puritan severity, biblical cruelty, strict probity, timid, morbid self-love and universal cant! And yet these are the two foremost nations of the world.
LXXXIX
As among princesses there has been an Empress Catherine II, why should a female Samuel Bernard[(56)], or a Lagrange[(57)] not appear among the middle-class?