them of their onerous superfluity, and saves them the trouble of
hoarding up money, of making contracts, locking trunks, carrying
keys about, and of dreading to be robbed by servants. He assists them
in their pleasures, and afterwards is able to serve them in their
passions; in a short time he regulates and dictates their conduct; he
is the oracle of the house, whose decisions are anxiously expected,
nay, even anticipated and surmised; he orders a slave to be punished,
and he is flogged; another to be freed, and he is set at liberty.
If a parasite does not make him laugh, he perhaps does not please
him, and therefore must be dismissed. The master of the house may
consider himself lucky if Troïlus leaves him his wife and children.
If at table he declares that a certain dish is excellent, the master
and the guests, who did not pay much attention to it, find it also
excellent, and cannot eat enough of it; if, on the contrary, he says
of some other dish that it is insipid, those who were just beginning
to enjoy it dare not swallow the piece they had in their mouths, but
throw it on the floor;[206] every eye is on him, and every one observes
his looks and his countenance before giving an opinion on the wine or
the dishes before them. Do not look for him anywhere else but in the
house of an opulent man, whose adviser he is; there he eats, sleeps,
digests his food, quarrels with his servant, gives audience to those
whom he employs, and puts off his creditors; he lays down the law in
the drawing-room, and receives there the adulation and homage of those
persons, who, more cunning than the rest, only wish to curry favour
with the master through Troïlusʼ intercession. If any one enters who
is unfortunate enough to have a countenance which Troïlus does not
like, he frowns and turns away his head; if a stranger accosts him,
he sits still, and if the latter sits down close to him, he leaves
his seat; if he talks to him, he does not reply, and if he continues
to speak, Troïlus stalks away into another chamber; if the stranger
follows him, he makes for the stairs, and would rather climb from one
storey to another or throw himself out of a window, than encounter
a man whose face and voice he dislikes. Both are very charming in
Troïlus, and he has turned them to good account to insinuate himself or
to overcome a difficulty. At last he considers everything unworthy of
his attention, and he scorns to keep his position[207] or to continue
to please by exercising any of those talents by which he first brought
himself into notice. It is a condescension if sometimes he leaves off
his musings and his taciturnity to contradict, and deigns once a day to
show his wit, though only to criticise. Do not expect him to listen to
what you may have to say, to be courteous, or to commend you, for you
are not even sure that he will permit you to approve him, or allow you
to be polite.[208]
(14.) Do not interrupt a stranger whom you meet by chance in a
stage-coach, at an entertainment, or at any public exhibition; and if
you listen to him, it will not be long before youʼll know who he is;
heʼll tell you his name, his residence, his native country, what his
property is worth, his position, and his fatherʼs, his motherʼs family,
his kindred, his family connections, and even his coat-of-arms; for he
will soon let you know that he is nobly born, and that he has a castle
beautifully furnished, a suitable retinue, and a carriage.[209]
(15.) Some men speak one moment before they think; others tediously
study everything they say, and in conversation bore us as painfully as
was the travail of their mind; they are, as it were, made up of phrases
and quaint expressions, whilst their gestures are as affected as their
behaviour. They call themselves “purists,”[210] and do not venture to
say the most trifling word not in use, however expressive it may be.
Nothing comes from them worth remembering, nothing is spontaneous and
unrestrained; they speak correctly,[211] but they are very tiresome.
(16.) The true spirit of conversation consists more in bringing out
the cleverness of others than in showing a great deal of it yourself;
he who goes away pleased with himself and his own wit is also greatly
pleased with you. Most men rather please than admire you; they seek
less to be instructed, and even to be amused, than to be praised and
applauded; the most delicate of pleasures is to please another person.
(17.) Too much imagination is to be avoided in our conversation and in
our writings, as it often gives rise to idle and puerile ideas, neither
tending to perfect our taste nor to improve our conduct. Our thoughts
should originate from sound sense and reasoning, and always be the
result of our judgment.
(18.) It is a sad thing when men have neither enough intelligence to
speak well nor enough sense to hold their tongues; this is the root of
all impertinence.
(19.) To say simply that a certain thing is good or bad, and to state
the reasons for its being so, requires some common-sense and power of
expression, which is not so easily found. A much shorter way is to give
oneʼs opinion peremptorily, which is a convincing proof a man is right
in his statement, namely, that the thing is execrable or wonderful.
(20.) Nothing is more displeasing to Heaven and to men than to confirm
everything said in conversation, and even the most trifling subjects,
with long and disgusting oaths. Whether a gentleman merely says “Yes”
or “No,” he deserves to be believed; his reputation swears for him,
adds weight to his words, and obtains for him every confidence.[212]
(21.) He who continually affirms he is a man of honour and honest as
well, that he wrongs no man but wishes the harm he has done to others
to fall on himself, and raps out an oath to be believed, does not even
know how to imitate an honest man.
An honest man, with all his modesty, cannot prevent people saying of
him what a dishonest man says of himself.
(22.) Cléon[213] talks always rather rudely or inaccurately; he does
either the one or the other; but he says he cannot help it, and that it
is his natural disposition to speak just as he thinks.
(23.) There are such things as to speak well, to speak easily, to
speak correctly, and to speak seasonably. We offend against the last
way of speaking if we mention a sumptuous entertainment we have just
been present at before people who have not had enough to eat; if we
boast of our good health before invalids; if we talk of our riches,
our income, and our fine furniture to a man who has not so much as an
income or a dwelling; in a word, if we speak of our prosperity before
people who are wretched; such a conversation is too much for them, and
the comparison which they then make between their condition and ours is
very painful.
(24.) “As for you,” says Euthyphron,[214] “you are rich, or ought to
be so, for you have a yearly income of ten thousand _livres_,[215]
all from land. I think that glorious! charming! and a man could be
happy with much less.” The person who talks in this fashion has fifty
thousand _livres_ a year, and thinks he has not half what he deserves.
He settles what youʼll have to pay, values what you are worth,
determines what you have to spend; and if he thought you deserved a
better fortune, and even such a one as he himself aspires to, he would
be certain to wish it to you. He is not the only man who makes such
wretched estimations or such odious comparisons; the world is full of
Euthyphrons.
(25.) A person inclined to the usual flattery, and accustomed to praise
and exaggeration, congratulates[216]
Theodemus on a sermon he did not hear, and of which no one had, as
yet, given him an account. He extols his genius, his delivery, and,
above all, his excellent memory, when, in truth, Theodemus had stopped
short in the middle of his sermon, and had forgotten what he wished to
say.[217]
(26.) Some abrupt, restless, conceited men, who are unemployed, and
have no manner of business to call them away, will dismiss you from
their presence in a few words, and only think to get rid of you;
you are still speaking to them, and they are already gone and have
disappeared. They are as impertinent as those people who stop you only
to bore you; but the former are perhaps less irksome.
(27.) To speak and to offend is with some people but one and the same
thing; they are biting and bitter; their words are steeped in gall
and wormwood; sneers as well as insolent and insulting remarks flow
from their lips. It had been well for them had they been born mute
or stupid; the little vivacity and intelligence they have prejudices
them more than dulness does others; they are not always satisfied
with giving sharp answers, they often attack arrogantly those who are
present, and damage the reputation of those who are absent; they butt
all round like rams, for rams, of course, must use their horns. We
therefore do not expect, by our sketch of them, to change such coarse,
restless, and stubborn individuals. The best thing a man can do is to
take to his heels as soon as he perceives them, without even turning
round to look behind him.[218]
(28.) There are persons of such a disposition or character that a man
ought never to be compromised with them; of such persons he should
complain as little as possible, and not even be permitted to vanquish
them in arguments.
(29.) When two persons have had a violent quarrel, of whom one is in
the right and the other is in the wrong, the bystanders, for fear
of being appealed to, or through a certain frowardness which always
seemed to me ill-timed, condemn both. This is an important lesson, and
a weighty and necessary reason for going away, even when a coxcomb is
seen in quite another direction, so as to avoid sharing in his disgrace.
(30.) I hate a man whom I cannot accost or salute before he bows to me,
without debasing myself in his eyes, or sharing in the good opinion
he has of himself. Montaigne would say:[219] “I will have elbow-room:
I will be courteous and affable according to my fancy, without fear
or remorse. I cannot strive against my inclination nor go contrary to
my disposition, which leads me to address myself to every one whom I
meet. If such a person is my equal and not my enemy, I anticipate his
courtesy; I ask him about his temper and his health, I offer him my
services without any haggling, and am not always on my guard, as some
people say. That man displeases me who by my knowledge of his habits
and behaviour deprives me of such liberty and freedom.
How should I remember, as soon as I see him afar off, to put on a
grave and important look, and to let him know that I think I am as good
as he, and better? To do this I must call to mind all my good qualities
and points, and his bad ones, so as to compare them together. This is
too much trouble for me, and I am not at all able of showing such an
abrupt and sudden presence of mind; even if I had been successful at
first, I am sure I should give way and lose my head a second time, for
I cannot put any restraint on myself nor assume a certain haughtiness
for any man.”[220]
(31.) We may be virtuous, intelligent, and well-behaved, and yet be
unbearable. By our manners, which we consider of no consequence, the
world often forms either a good or a bad opinion of us; a little care
to appear obliging and polite will prevent its condemning us. The least
thing is enough to make people believe that we are proud, impolite,
haughty, and disobliging; but, on the other hand, still less is needed
to make them esteem us.
(32.) Politeness does not always produce kindness of heart, justice,
complacency, or gratitude, but it gives to a man at least the
appearance of it, and makes him seem externally what he really should
be.
We may define all the essentials of politeness, but we cannot determine
how and where they should be used; they depend on ordinary habits and
customs, are connected with times and places, and are not the same in
both sexes nor in different ranks of life; intelligence alone cannot
find this out; politeness is acquired and perfected by imitation.
Only some persons are naturally disposed to be polite, as others
are in acquiring great talents and solid virtue. Politeness tends,
undoubtedly, to advance merit and to render it agreeable; a man must
have very eminent qualities to hold his own without being polite.
The very essence of politeness seems to be to take care that by our
words and actions we make other people pleased with us as well as with
themselves.
(33.) It is an offence against politeness to bestow excessive praise on
a personʼs singing or playing before any other who has sung or played
for you, or to commend another poet in the presence of those who have
read you their verses.
(34.) A man may be giving entertainments and feasts to certain persons,
may make them presents, and let them enjoy themselves, and he may do
this well; but he will do much better by acting according to their
inclinations.
(35.) It is more or less rude to scorn indiscriminately all kinds of
praise; we ought to be proud of that which comes from honest men, who
praise sincerely those things in us which are really commendable.
(36.) An intelligent man, who is naturally proud, abates nothing of his
pride and haughtiness because he is poor; on the contrary, if anything
will mollify him and make him more pliant and sociable, it is a little
prosperity.
(37.) Not to be able to bear with all bad-tempered people with whom the
world is crowded, shows that a man has not a good temper himself: small
change is as necessary in business as golden coin.
(38.) To live with people who have been quarrelling and to whose
complaints you have to listen, is like being in a court of justice
from morning till night listening to pleadings and lawsuits.
(39.) Two persons had all their lives been very intimate with one
another; their incomes were in common, they lived together, and were
never out of one anotherʼs sight. After fourscore years they thought
it was time to part and put an end to their intimacy; they had then
but one day to live, and dared not attempt to pass it together: they
hastened to break before death, as their complacency would hold out no
longer. They would have been good models had they not lived so long,
for had they died one moment sooner, they still would have been good
friends and have left behind them a rare example of perseverance in
friendship.[221]
(40.) Families are often disturbed by mistrust, jealousy, and
antipathy, while outwardly they seem happy, peaceable, and cheerful,
and we suppose they enjoy a tranquillity which does not exist; there
are very few who can bear investigation. The visit you pay only
interrupts a domestic quarrel which awaits but your departure to break
out afresh.
(41.) In all societies common-sense always gives way first. The most
sensible people often are swayed by a most foolish and eccentric
personage; they study his weakness, his temper, his fancies, and put
up with them; they avoid thwarting him, and everybody gives him his
way; when his countenance betrays he is cheerful, he is commended; they
are grateful to him for not being always insufferable; he is feared,
considered, obeyed, and sometimes beloved.
(42.) None but those persons who have had aged relatives, or those who
have them still, and whose heirs they may become, can tell what they
had, or have now, to endure.
(43.) Cleantes[222] is a very worthy man; he has taken unto himself
a wife, who is the best and most sensible person in the world; both,
in their ways, are the life and soul of the company they keep; a more
straightforward and more polite behaviour than theirs is nowhere to
be met with. They are to part to-morrow, and the deed of separation
is already drawn up at the lawyerʼs. Surely they must possess certain
merits which do not harmonise together and certain virtues which are
incompatible.
(44.) A man may be sure of the dowry, the jointure, and his marriage
settlements, but scarcely of the contract the parents have entered
upon to board and lodge the young couple for a certain time;[223] for
that depends on the frail harmony between the mother-in-law and the
daughter-in-law, which often ends the first year of the marriage.
(45.) A father-in-law loves both his son and daughter-in-law, a
mother-in-law her son and not her daughter-in-law; the latter pays her
back in her own coin.
(46.) What a step-mother loves the least in the wide world are her
husbandʼs children; the fonder she is of her husband the worse
step-mother she shows herself.
Step-mothers make of towns and villages complete deserts, and stock the
country with more beggars, vagrants, servants, and slaves, than poverty
does.
(47.) G ... and H ... are neighbours, living in the country;[224]
their lands are contiguous; they dwell in a secluded and solitary spot.
Far from towns and all intercourse with men, we might have thought
that the dread of being completely estranged from the world and from
all society should have kept up their mutual intimacy; but it is
difficult to say what trifling circumstance has caused their being at
variance, renders them implacable, and transmits their hatred to their
descendants. Relatives, or even brothers, never quarrelled about a
thing of less consequence.
Suppose there were but two men on this habitable globe, the sole
possessors of it, who should divide it between them, even then I am
convinced that soon some cause of disagreement would spring up, though
it were only about boundaries.
(48.) It is often easier as well as more advantageous to conform
ourselves to other menʼs opinions than to bring them over to ours.
(49.) I am now approaching a little town, and I am already on a hill
whence I discover it. It is built on a slope, a river washes its walls
and then meanders through a lovely meadow; a dense forest shelters it
from cold winds and northern blasts. The weather is so bright that I
can count its towers and steeples, and it seems, as it were, painted on
the slope of the hill. I exclaim: “How agreeable must it be to dwell
underneath such a pure sky and in such a delightful abode!” I enter
the town, and have not spent there above two or three nights when I
feel I am just like its inhabitants; I long to get away from it.
(50.) There is a certain thing which has never yet been seen under the
canopy of heaven, and, in all likelihood, never will be: it is a small
town without various parties, where all the families are united and
all relations visit one another without reserve, where a marriage does
not engender a civil war, where there are no disputes about precedence
at the offertory,[225] the carrying of the censer, or the giving of a
cake to the church to be consecrated and distributed during mass, as
well as about processions and funerals: whence gossiping, falsehoods,
and slandering are banished; where the _bailli_ and the president of
the court, the _élus_ and the _assesseurs_[226] are on speaking terms
together; where the dean is well with the canons, the canons do not
disdain the choristers, and the choristers bear with the singing-boys.
(51.) Country people and fools are apt to get angry, and to fancy you
make fun of them or despise them. You should never venture on the most
innocent and inoffensive joke, unless it be with people of culture or
intelligence.
(52.) A man should not pretend to show his talents in the society of
men of rank; their very rank forbids it; nor with people of inferior
degree who repel you by being always on their guard.
(53.) Men of merit discover, discern, and find out each other
reciprocally; he who would be esteemed should frequent persons who are
themselves estimable.
(54.) He who is of so lofty a rank as to be above repartee, ought never
to joke in a racy kind of way.
(55.) There are some little failings which we freely abandon to
censure, and about which we do not dislike being bantered; when we
banter others we should select failings of the same kind.
(56.) It is a foolʼs privilege to laugh at an intelligent man; he is in
society what a jester is at court—of no consequence whatever.
(57.) Banter is often a proof of want of intelligence.
(58.) You fancy a man your dupe, but if he only pretends to be so, who
is the greatest dupe, you or he?
(59.) If you observe carefully those people who praise nobody, who are
always finding fault, and are never satisfied with any one, you will
discover them to be persons with whom nobody is satisfied.
(60.) The proud and disdainful will find precisely in society the
contrary of what they expect, which is to be esteemed.
(61.) The pleasure of social intercourse amongst friends is kept up
by a similarity of morals and manners, and by slender differences in
opinion about science; this confirms us in our sentiments, exercises
our faculties or instructs us through arguments.
(62.) Two persons will not be friends long if they are not inclined to
pardon each otherʼs little failings.
(63.) How many fine and useless arguments are laid before a person in
great affliction to attempt to soothe him! Things from without which
we call events are sometimes too strong for arguments and nature.
Eat, drink, do not kill yourself with grief, think only to live, are
magnificent admonitions, and impracticable as well. If we say to a man
that it is not wise to unsettle his mind so much, do we not tell him in
reality that he is a fool for being so unfortunate?
(64.) Advice which is necessary in all matters of business, is
sometimes hurtful in social affairs to those who give it, and useless
to the persons to whom it is given. You observe, perhaps, faults in
manners and morals which are either not acknowledged, or, perhaps,
considered virtues; you blot out some passages in a composition which
please the author the most, and in which he thinks he has surpassed
himself. By those means you lose the confidence of your friend without
making him better or wiser.
(65.) Not long since certain persons of both sexes formed a society for
intellectual conversation and interchange of ideas.[227] They left to
the vulgar herd the art of talking intelligibly; an expression used by
them, and which was not very clear, was followed by another still more
obscure, which was improved on by others still more enigmatic, which
were always crowned with prolonged applause, so that at last, by what
they were pleased to call refinements, sentiments, turn and delicacy of
expression, they succeeded in becoming unintelligible to others and to
themselves. Common-sense, judgment, memory, or the smallest capacity
were unnecessary in their conversation; all that was wanted was a
certain amount of intellect, and that not of the right sort, but of a
spurious kind, and in which imagination was too predominant.
(66.) I know it, Theobaldus,[228] you have grown old; but would you
have me think you decline, that you are no longer a poet nor a wit,
that you are now as bad a critic of all kind of writings as you are
a wretched author, and that your conversation is neither ingenuous
nor refined? Your careless and conceited behaviour reassures me, and
convinces me of my error. You are the same to-day as you ever were, and
perhaps better; for if you are so brisk and vivacious at your age, what
name, Theobaldus, did you deserve in your youth, when you were the pet
and the caprice of certain ladies who only swore by you, believed every
word you uttered, and then exclaimed, “It is delightful! What has he
said?”
(67.) We frequently speak hastily in conversation, often through
vanity and natural inclination, seldom with the necessary caution, and
only anxious to reply to what we have not heard; we follow our own
ideas, and explain them without the smallest deference for other menʼs
arguments; we are very far from finding out the truth, as we are not
yet agreed upon what we are looking for. If any man could hear such
conversations and write them down, he would now and then find many good
things said without the smallest result.
(68.) Some time ago a sort of insipid and puerile conversation was in
fashion, which turned on trivial questions about the affections, and
what people please to call passion or tenderness. The reading of some
novels first introduced this talk amongst the most gentlemanly men in
town and at court, but they soon discarded it, and then the citizens
took it up, as well as puns and plays on words.[229]