There is no rational commensuration between what affects us and what affects others; the first we sense physically, the other only touches us morally.
Virtue only needs to be worshipped; it follows the path to happiness... it must be so, a thousand arms open to receive its devotees, if they are pursued by adversity. But everybody deserts the guilty man... one blushes at one’s attachment to him or at the tears one sheds for him, there is a fear of contagion, he is banished from everybody’s hearts, and one condemns out of pride the man one ought to help out of humanity.
If we punished only the crimes we could prove, we would not enjoy the pleasure of dragging our fellow human beings to the scaffold so much as four times a century, and that is the only thing that makes us respected.
Mme de Franval, indulgent and sweet-natured as ever, and always happy when anything brought her closer to a man who was dearer to her than her own life, went along with all the desires of that treacherous husband, anticipated them, served them, and shared them without exception, not daring to make the most of the moment, as she should have done, to persuade that barbarian to treat her better, and not plunge his unhappy wife every day into an abyss of pain and suffering.
He would doubtless have promised anything for the mere pleasure of breaking all bounds; perhaps he would even have liked her to ask him to swear on oath so he could add the attractions of perjury to his horrible pleasures.
What do I care for Williams? What do I care for anything on this earth? Listen, my dear fellow, when this combustible heart of mine falls in love, there is no obstacle capable of preventing it from being satisfied. The more I fall in love, the more combustible it becomes. For me, having a woman is satisfying only by reason of the trouble I am put to on the way. Bedding a woman is the most prosaic thing in the world.
Remorse! Can a heart like mine ever know the meaning of such a feeling? The habit of evildoing expunged it long ago from my calloused soul.
And there you see what happens to the promises of eternal love which we women are foolish enough to believe! The more affectionate we are, the more likely it is that our seducers will desert us... the unfeeling brutes... the more we try to keep them, the greater the chance that they will abandon us.
How many times, good God, have I not wished it were possible to attack the sun, to deprive the universe of it, or to use it to set the world ablaze – those would be crimes indeed, and not the little excesses in which we indulge, which do no more than metamorphose, in the course of a year, a dozen creatures into clods of earth.
Those who have no principles are never more dangerous than when they reach the age when they lose all sense of shame. Their hearts are gangrened by depravity, they refine and polish up their first offences and convert them into heinous crimes while still believing they are still at the stage of minor misdemeanours.
You have no idea, my friend, of the effect of a young woman’s tears on all these weak and timid souls.
She made him appreciate that a man with the birth and status of Oxtiern must be incapable of deceit. The innocent creature! She did not know that vices, supported by birth and wealth, and then emboldened by impunity, only become more dangerous.
He who perpetrates an outrage may well be quick to forget what he has done. But they who have suffered at his hands are justified at least in remembering the wrongs he has done them.
The President was in seventh heaven when he heard himself being teased like this; he strutted about and thrust his chest out; never did a man of the robe stick out his neck so far, not even one who has just hanged a man.
The more amorous the President became, the more his fatuousness made him intolerable: there is nothing in the world as comical as a lawyer in love – he is the perfect picture of gaucheness, impertinence and ineptitude.
The equality prescribed by the Revolution is simply the weak man’s revenge upon the strong; it’s just what we saw in the past, but in reverse; that everyone should have his turn is only meet. And it shall be turnabout again tomorrow, for nothing in Nature is stable and the governments men direct are bound to prove as changeable and ephemeral as they.
There is no stupidity religions have omitted to revere; and you know just as well as I, my friends, that when one examines a human institution, the first thing one must do is discard all religious notions. They are poison to lucidity.
The philosopher who travels the world in order to learn must put up with all customs, all religions, all kinds of weather and climate, all beds and all kinds of food, and leave to the voluptuous, indolent man in the capital his prejudices... his luxury... that obscene luxury that, as it never contains any real needs, creates artificial ones every day at the expense of fortune and health.
Without principles and without virtue, and still full of the prejudices of that group of men whose pride had just led them to fight against the sovereign himself, Oxtiern imagined that nothing in the world could curb his passions. Well, of all those that burned within him, love was the most impetuous; but this feeling, which can be almost a virtue in a good soul, is bound to become the source of many crimes in a corrupt heart like that of Oxtiern.
I would, thank God, watch the universe perish without shedding a tear.