"No, indeed, it's shocking! How could you tell your wife about it? You see, she has come to prevent us fighting!" "I have come to bury you," she answered.
Happy the husband who can tell his wife everything! The result did not belie this woman's haughty words. Her action would have been considered hardly the thing in England. Thus does false decency diminish the little happiness that exists here below.
XCIX
The delightful Donézan said yesterday: "In my youth, and well on in my career—for I was fifty in '89—women wore powder in their hair.
"I own that a woman without powder gives me a feeling of repugnance; the first impression is always that of a chamber-maid who hasn't had time to get dressed."
Here we have the one argument against Shakespeare and in favour of the dramatic unities.
While young men read nothing but La Harpe[(61)], the taste for great powdered toupées, such as the late Queen Marie Antoinette used to wear, can still last some years. I know people too, who despise Correggio and Michael Angelo, and, to be sure, M. Donézan was extremely clever.
C
Cold, brave, calculating, suspicious, contentious, for ever afraid of being attracted by anyone who might possibly be laughing at them in secret, absolutely devoid of enthusiasm, and a little jealous of people who saw great events with Napoleon, such was the youth of that age, estimable rather than lovable. They forced on the country that Right-Centre form of government-to-the-lowest-bidder. This temper in the younger generation was to be found even among the conscripts, each of whom only longed to finish his time.
All systems of education, whether given expressly or by chance, form men for a certain period in their life. The education of the age of Louis XV made twenty-five the finest moment in the lives of its pupils.[1]