"The same desire of pleasing, etc.... We are quite astonished in hearing men converse on such subjects to find them attributing such beautiful effects to ignorance."
P. [232], l. 31:
"We do not wish a lady to write books any more than we wish her to dance at the opera."
P. [237], l. 13:
"A merely accomplished woman cannot infuse her tastes into the minds of her sons....
"By having gained information a mother may inspire her sons with valuable tastes, which may abide by them through life and carry him up to all the sublimities of knowledge."
P. [237], l. 27:
"Mankind are much happier for the discovery of barometers, thermometers, steam-engines and all the innumerable inventions in the arts and the sciences.... The same observation is true of such works as those of Dryden, Pope, Milton and Shakespeare."
Stendhal's habit of quoting without acknowledgment from all kinds of writings is so curious, that it demands a word to itself. His wholesale method of plagiarism has been established in other works beside the present one; almost the whole of his first work—La Vie de Haydn (1814)—is stolen property. See above, note [18]. Goethe was amused to find his own experiences transferred to the credit of the author of Rome, Naples et Florence!
If there is any commentary necessary on this literary piracy—it is to be found in a note by Stendhal (vide above, Chapter XXXVII, p. [132]) on a passage where, for once, he actually acknowledges a thought from La Rochefoucauld:—
"The reader will have recognised, without my marking it each time, several other thoughts of celebrated writers. It is history which I am attempting to write, and such thoughts are the facts."