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Rue Gracieuse.
corner of Rue Pierre-Lombard
Rue Petit-Gentilly
Rue du Petit-Banquier.
Right at the corner of Rue du Pet...
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the low dome of La Salpêtrière.
First problem: how to produce wealth. Second problem: how to share it out. The first problem contains the issue of work. The second contains the issue of wages. The first problem is about the use of resources. The second, about the distribution of benefits. Effective use of resources results in national strength. Fair distribution of benefits results in individual happiness. Fair distribution should be understood to mean not equal but equitable distribution. The fundamental equality is equity.
A certain amount of daydreaming does you good, like a narcotic in small doses. It sedates the sometimes severe fevers of the toiling intellect and produces in the mind a cool and gentle mist that softens the over-harsh contours of pure thought, fills in the gaps and intervals here and there, creates cohesion and smooths the sharp edges of ideas. But too much daydreaming drags you down and overwhelms you. Woe to the intellectual kind of worker whose thinking completely subsides into daydreaming! He thinks he will easily regain lost ground, and he tells himself that after all they both amount to
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Women wield their beauty the way children play with knives. They hurt themselves with it.
And strange to say, the first symptom of true love in a young man is timidity; in a young girl, it is boldness.
Since extreme innocence verges on extreme flirtatiousness, she smiled at him, quite openly.
‘My name is Cosette.’
Mi chiamano Mimì
ma il mio nome è Lucia.
Man is not a circle with a single centre. He is an ellipse with two focal points: one actions, the other ideas.
But let those set against the future think about it. By saying no to progress, it is not the future they are condemning, but themselves. They are giving themselves a serious illness. They are infecting themselves with the past. There is only one way of rejecting Tomorrow, which is to die.
Volume by volume, the whole library went the same way. He said at times, ‘After all I’m eighty’, as if he had some secret hope of reaching the end of his days before reaching the end of his books. His sadness increased.
Rue Contrescarpe,
Rue Bassompierre
Boulevard Bourdon,
Rue Ste-Croix-de-la-Bretonnerie
Rue des Nonnains-d’Hyères,
At a given moment, every barricade that holds out inevitably becomes the raft of the Medusa.
For, if liberty is the summit, equality is the base.
The spoken word being breath, the thrilling of minds is like the rustling of leaves.
Remarkably enough, the poetry of a people determines its progress. The degree of civilization is measured by the degree of imagination.
Races fossilized by dogma or corrupted by lucre are unfit to guide civilization.
In this century people do business, they speculate on the stock exchange, they earn money and they’re stingy. They’re groomed and polished on the surface. They’re impeccably turned out, washed, soaped, scraped, shaved, combed, waxed, smoothed, rubbed, brushed, cleaned on the outside, irreproachable, like a polished stone, discreet, neat and tidy, and at the same time – heaven knows! – in the depths of their consciences lurk dung-heaps and cesspools from which a cow-girl who uses her fingers to blow her nose would shrink.
These are the true joys. No other joy, save these. Love is the only ecstasy. All the rest is weeping. To love, or to have loved, is enough. Ask for nothing more. There is no other pearl to be found in life’s shadowy convolutions. To love is an achievement.
Nature divides the living into those arriving and those departing. Those departing are turned towards the shadow, those arriving towards the light. Hence, a divergence that for the old is inevitable, and for the young unintentional.
Adolphe,
Histoire de dix ans 1830–1840,
‘La débâcle qui vient d’avoir lieu dans les cotons nous a convertis plusieurs juste-milieu … L’avenir des peuples fermente et s’élabore dans nos rangs obscurs … Toutes les questions étaient posées lorsque nous nous sommes réunis et une fois encore les termes étaient ceux-ci: action ou réaction, révolution ou contre-révolution; car à notre époque on ne croit plus ni à l’inaction ni à l’immuabilité. Pour le peuple ou contre le peuple, c’est la question, et il n’y en a pas d’autre … Le jour où nous ne vous conviendrons plus, cassez-nous, mais jusque-là aidez-nous à marcher …’
Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814), author of Tableau de Paris,
Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas by Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray (1760–97).
Mademoiselle de Scudéry as described in her novel Clélie.
A volume of Contes du Bouzingo, advertised in 1832 and 1833 and for which Gérard de Nerval wrote ‘La Main de Gloire’, never materialized.
Les Noces de Gamache (Gamache’s Wedding) is the title of a ballet-pantomime inspired by the Quixote incident, written by Louis Milon with music by François-Charlemagne Lefebvre, first performed at the Paris Opéra in 1801, and of a comic opera by Thomas Sauvage and Jean-Henri Dupin with music by Saverio Mercadante, first performed at the Théâtre Royal de l’Odéon in 1825. Mendelssohn’s comic opera Die Hochzeit des Camacho (Camacho’s Wedding) was first performed in Berlin in 1827.
