Part 9

(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]

(69.) Some city ladies are so refined that they do not know or dare not pronounce the names of streets, squares, and public places, which they think are not noble enough to be known. They speak of the _Louvre_, the _Place Royale_, but they use certain circumlocutions and phrases rather than mention some names; and if, by chance, such a word escapes them, it is not without some alteration, and after some changes which reassure them; they are less natural in this than the ladies at court, who, when they have occasion to speak of the _Halles_, the _Châtelet_, or the like, simply say the _Halles_ or the _Châtelet_.[230]

(70.) If people pretend sometimes not to remember certain names which they think obscure, and affect to spoil them in the pronunciation, it is through the good opinion they have of their own names.

(71.) When we are in a good temper, and when we can talk as we like, we often say silly things, which, in truth, we do not pretend to be anything else, and which are considered very good, because they are very bad.[231] This inferior kind of joking, fit only for the mob, has already infected a great part of the youth at court. It is true we need not fear it will spread further, for it is really too insipid and coarse to thrive in a country which is the centre of good taste and politeness. However, it should be rendered distasteful to those who employ it, for though it is never used seriously, yet it continually takes the place of better things in their mind and in their ordinary conversation.

(72.) Between saying bad things or saying such good things which everybody knows, and pretending they are quite new, there is so little difference that I do not know which to choose.

(73.) “Lucanus[232] has said a pretty thing. There is a fine expression in Claudianus.[233] There is a certain passage in Seneca;”[234] and then follow a good many Latin words, often quoted before people who do not know what they mean, though they pretend to understand them. The right thing would be to have sense and intelligence ourselves, for then we might dispense with the ancients, or after having read them carefully, we might still select the best and quote them pertinently.

(74.) Hermagoras[235] knows not who is king of Hungary, and wonders that no one talks about the king of Bohemia.[236] Speak not to him of the wars in Flanders or in Holland,[237] or, at least, you must excuse him from answering any questions about them; he mixes up all dates; he neither knows when they began nor ended; battles and sieges are all new to him; but he is very well read in the Titansʼ war, and can tell you its progress and the most trifling details; nothing has escaped him; he unravels in the same way the horrible chaos of the Babylonian and Assyrian monarchies; he knows intimately the Egyptians and their dynasties. He never saw Versailles, nor ever will; but he has almost seen the tower of Babel, and counted its steps; he has found out how many architects were employed about that building, and even has their names at his fingersʼ ends. He believes Henri IV. to be a son of Henri III.,[238] and neglects to know anything about the reigning houses of France, Austria, and Bavaria. He asks what is the use of studying such trifles; but he can quote to you all the kings of Media and Babylon, and the names of Apronal, Herigebal, Noesnemordach, and Mardokampad[239] are to him as familiar as those of Valois and Bourbon are to us. He has yet to learn that the Emperor[240] is married, but he can tell you that Ninus[241] had two wives. He hears the king enjoys perfect health, and this reminds him that Thetmosis, a king of Egypt, was a valetudinarian, and that he inherited this disposition from his grandfather, Alipharmutosis.[242] What does he not know? What in all venerable antiquity is hid from him? He will tell you that Semiramis, or, as some call her, Serimaris, spoke so much like her son Ninyas, that their voices could not be distinguished from one another; but he dare not decide whether the mother had a manly voice like her son, or the son an effeminate voice like his mother; he will confide to you that Nimrod was left-handed, and Sesostris[243] ambidexter; that it is an error to imagine one of the Artaxerxes was called Longimanus[244] because his arms reached down to his knees, and not because one of his hands was longer than the other; he adds that though some grave authors affirm that it was his right hand, he has good grounds to maintain it was the left hand.

(75.) Ascanius is a sculptor, Hegio an iron-founder, Æschines a fuller, and Cydias a wit,[245] for that is his trade. He has a signboard, a shop, work that is ordered,[246] and journeymen who work under him; he cannot possibly let you have those stanzas he has promised you in less than a month, unless he breaks his word with Dosithea, who has engaged him to write an elegy; he has also an idyl on the loom which is for Crantor, who presses him for it, and has promised him a liberal reward. You can have whatever you like—prose or verse, for he is just as good in one as in the other. If you want a letter of condolence, or one on some personʼs absence, he will write them; he has them even ready made; step into his warehouse, and you may pick and choose. Cydias has a friend who has nothing else to do but to promise to certain people a long time beforehand that he will come to them, and who, finally, introduces him in some society as a man seldom to be met with, and exquisite in conversation. Then, just as a vocalist sings or as a lute-player touches his instrument in a company where it has been expected, Cydias, after having coughed, puts back his ruffles, extends his hand, opens his fingers, and very gravely utters his over-refined thoughts and his sophisticated arguments. Unlike those persons whose principles agree, and who know that reason and truth are one and the same thing, and snatch the words out of one anotherʼs mouths to acquiesce in one anotherʼs sentiments, he never opens his mouth but to contradict: “I think,” he says graciously, “it is just the opposite of what you say;” or, “I am not at all of your opinion,” or else, “Formerly I was under the same delusion as you are now; but, ...” and then he continues, “There are three things to be considered,” to which he adds a fourth. He is an insipid chatterer; no sooner has he obtained a footing into any society, than he looks out for some ladies whom he can fascinate, before whom he can set forth his wit or his philosophy, and produce his rare conceptions; for, whether he speaks or writes, he ought never to be suspected of saying what is true or false, sensible or ridiculous; his only care is not to express the same sentiments as some one else, and to differ from everybody. Therefore, in conversation, he often waits till every one has given his opinion on some casual subject, or one which not seldom he has introduced himself, in order to utter dogmatically things which are perfectly new, but which he thinks decisive and unanswerable. “Lucianus[247] and Seneca,”[248] says Cydias, “come pretty near me; but as for Plato,[249] Virgil,[250] and Theocritus[251] they are quite below me,” and his flatterer takes care to confirm him every morning in this opinion. As Cydias has the same taste and interest as the revilers of Homer,[252] he quietly expects that mankind will be undeceived and prefer modern poets to the blind bard; then he will put himself at the head of these poets, and reserve the second place for a friend.[253] He is, in a word, a compound of pedantry and formality, to be admired by cits and rustics, in whom, nevertheless, there is nothing great except the opinion he has of himself.

(76.) Profound ignorance makes a man dogmatical; he who knows nothing thinks he can teach others what he just now has learned himself; whilst he who knows a great deal can scarcely imagine any one should be unacquainted with what he says, and, therefore, speaks with more indifference.

(77.) Great things only require to be simply told, for they are spoiled by emphasis; but little things should be clothed in lofty language, as they are only kept up by expression, tone of voice, and style of delivery.

(78.) I think we generally say things more delicately than we write them.

(79.) Hardly any other men but born gentlemen or men of culture are capable of keeping a secret.

(80.) All confidence placed in another is dangerous if it is not perfect, for on almost all occasions we ought to tell everything or to conceal everything. We have already told too much of our secret, if one single circumstance is to be kept back.

(81.) Some men promise to keep your secret and yet reveal it without knowing they are doing so; they do not wag their lips, and yet they are understood; it is read on their brow and in their eyes; it is seen through their breast; they are transparent. Other men do not exactly tell a thing that has been intrusted to them, but they talk and act in such a manner that people discover it for themselves. Lastly, there are some who despise your secret, of whatever importance it may be: “it is something mysterious which such-a-one has imparted to me and forbade me to mention it,” and then out it comes.

If a secret is revealed, the person who has confided it to another is to be blamed.

(82.) Nicander converses with Eliza about the gentle and courteous way in which he lived with his wife from the day of their marriage to the hour of her death; he had already said how sorry he was he had no children by her, and he now repeats it; he talks of the houses he has in town, and then of an estate he has in the country; he calculates what it brings him in, draws a plan of the buildings, describes its situation, expatiates on the conveniency of the apartments as well as on the richness and elegance of the furniture; he assures her he loves good cheer and fine horses and carriages, and complains that his late wife did not care much for play and company. “You are so wealthy,” said one of his friends to him, “why do you not buy some official post,[254] or why not a certain piece of ground which would enlarge your estate?” “People think I am richer than I really am,” replies Nicander. He neither forgets his birth nor his relatives, and speaks of his cousin, the superintendent of finances, or of his kinswoman, the Lord Chancellorʼs wife. He informs

Eliza how discontented he has become with his nearest relatives, and even with his heirs. “Am I wrong, and have I any cause for doing them good?” he asks her, and desires her to give her opinion. He then intimates that he is in a weak and wretched state of health, and speaks of the vault where he wishes to be interred. He insinuates himself, and fawns on all those who visit the lady he courts. But Eliza has not courage enough to grow rich at the cost of being his wife. Whilst he is thus conversing with her a military man is introduced, and by his mere presence defeats all the plans of the worthy citizen, who gets up disappointed and vexed, and goes somewhere else to say that he wishes to marry for the second time.

(83.) Wise men sometimes avoid the world, that they may not be surfeited with it.

VI.

OF THE GIFTS OF FORTUNE.

(1.) A very rich man may eat of his side-dishes, have his walls and recesses painted, enjoy a palatial residence in the country and another in town, have a large retinue, even become connected with a duke through marriage,[255] and make of his son a great nobleman, and all this will be considered quite right and proper; but to live happy is perhaps the privilege of other men.

(2.) A lofty birth or a large fortune portend merit, and cause it to be the sooner noticed.

(3.) The ambition of a coxcomb is excusable, because, after he has made a large fortune, people will be careful to discover in him some merit which he never had before, and as great as it is in his own opinion.

(4.) As favour and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before.

(5.) We could never imagine what a strange disproportion a few or a great many pieces of money make between men, if we did not see it every day with our own eyes.

Those few or many pieces of money are what determine men to adopt the profession of arms, of the law, or of the church, for they have hardly any other vocation.

(6.) Two merchants were neighbours and in the same line of business, but their success in life was quite different. They each had a daughter; and these, brought up together, had been as intimate as girls of the same age and the same condition in life could have been; later, one of them, driven by want and misery, endeavoured to get a place, and entered the service of a great lady, one of the highest rank at court;[256] and this same lady had formerly been her bosom friend.

(7.) If a financier fails in making a lucky stroke, the courtiers say of him, “He is a mere citizen, a man sprung from nothing, a boor;” but if he succeeds, they become suitors for his daughterʼs hand.

(8.) Some men in their youth serve an apprenticeship to a certain trade, to follow a very different one the rest of their lives.[257]