French Classics

Page 178: "Gil Blas, discouraged, was about to leave Dr. Sangrado's service, when that distinguished physician said to him--we take up the text of the story once more:" 'Blas' a...

The eighteenth century was an age of universal reaction in France. Religion, or rather ecclesiasticism--for, in the France of those times, religion was the Church, and the Churc...

When he quitted his chamber at midnight for supper, twelve servants bore each a lighted torch before him, which were placed near his table, and gave a brilliant light to the apa...

He had threescore and three tricks to come by it [money] at his need of which the most honorable and most ordinary was in manner of thieving, secret purloining, and filching, fo...

Amongst other oversights Pompey is charged withal at the battle of Pharsalia, he is condemned for making his army stand still to receive the enemy's charge, "by reason that" (I...

Of the foregoing maxim it may justly be said, that its truth and point depend upon the assumption, implicit, that there is such a thing as virtue--an assumption which the whole...

The sage Levantines have a tale About a rat that weary grew Of all the cares which life assail, And to a Holland cheese withdrew. His solitude was there profound, Extending thro...

_Phil._ And our sex does you justice in this respect; but we will show to certain minds who treat us with proud contempt, that women also have knowledge; that, like men, they ca...

The plan of these later letters was to have a Paris gentleman write to a friend of his in the country (the "provincial"), detailing interviews held by him with a Jesuit priest o...

Of Madame de Sevigne, if it were permitted here to make a pun and a paradox, one might justly and descriptively say that she was not a woman of letters, but only a woman of--let...

What was it changed this woman's mood to serious? She could not have been hearing Massillon's celebrated sermon on the "Fewness of the Elect," for Massillon was yet only a boy o...

Felix makes a sad contrast with the high-heartedness which the other characters, most of them, display. He is base enough to suspect that Severus is base enough to be false and...

The greatness of Bossuet is an article in the French national creed. No Frenchman disputes it; no Frenchman, indeed, but proclaims it. Protestant agrees with Catholic, infidel w...

To this thought I devote my mind. I imagine I see and rove through this same eternity, and discover no end, but find it to be always a boundless tract. I imagine that the wide p...

One thing in just qualification of the praise due to Saurin for his pulpit eloquence requires to be added. When he attempts the figure of apostrophe, as he frequently does, pers...

Remember that the sovereign who is most absolute is always least powerful; he seizes upon all, and his grasp is ruin. He is, indeed, the sole proprietor of whatever his state co...

Notwithstanding all he could say in praise of water, and the excellent beverages he taught me to compose, I drank of it with such moderation, that perceiving my temperance, he s...

But nothing served Rome more effectually than the respect which she inspired among all nations. She immediately reduced kings to silence, and rendered them as dumb. With the lat...

I wished to show what in our days a democratic people really was, and, by a rigorously accurate picture, to produce a double effect on the men of my day. To those who have fanci...

"May I take the liberty to ask if you do not receive great pleasure from reading Horace?" said Candide. "There are maxims in this writer," replied Pococurante, "from whence a ma...

My master had a journeyman named M. Verrat.... [He] took it into his head to rob his mother of some of her early asparagus and sell it, converting the proceeds into some extra g...

From Rousseau's "Confessions," we have not room to purvey further. It is a melancholy book--written under monomaniac suspicion on the part of the author that he was the object o...

Everybody has heard of the Encyclopaedists of France. Who are they? They are a group of men who, during the eighteenth century, associated themselves together for the production...

We close our series of extracts by giving what this most brilliant among the French women that have been at the same time great talkers and great writers found to say of that hi...

Sainte-Beuve, not in his essay on Beranger (which, in appreciating, somewhat depreciates the poet), but among the interesting things that, under the title "Chateaubriana," he pr...

There is an indefinable French difference, but, that apart, the foregoing is somewhat like Goldsmith in his "Deserted Village." Or is it the resemblance of meter that produces t...

The Grave said to the Rose, "What of the dews of morn, Love's flower, what end is theirs?" "And what of souls outworn, Of them whereon doth close The tomb's mouth unawares?" The...

The Abbe Maury is a critic belonging to the classical school of French literature. His best-known work is a treatise on pulpit eloquence. La Harpe is another critic of the same...

There occurred a sharp, decisive change, a change, however, not consistently maintained, in George Sand's quality of production. From producing novels of social ferment, she tur...

Madame Swetchine's life was chiefly spent in Paris, where the French language, already long before, in St. Petersburg, grown easy and tripping on her tongue, became to her a sec...

VOLTAIRE (vol-ter'), Francois Marie Arouet de (1694-1778), 10, 17, 35, 43, 56, 65, 100, 118, 124, 125, 126, 128, 152, 167, 190, 199-212, 238, 239, 245, 248, 249, 285, 311.