It is not for nothing that it is said that he who does not feel his memory to be strong enough has no business lying.4 I am well aware that grammarians make a distinction between ‘to tell an untruth’ and ‘to lie’; they assert that ‘to tell an untruth’ is to say something false which one thinks to be true, and that the definition of mentiri [to lie] in Latin (the source of mentir in French) implies something like, ‘to go against the testimony of one’s knowledge’, and so only applies to those who speak at variance with what they know. They are the people I am talking about.
