Virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant when it is crushed.

To love, for us men, is to clasp one woman with our arms, feeling that she lives and breathes just as we do, suffers as we do, thinks with us, loves with us, and, above all, sins with us.

Fate is usually swift when she deals a blow.

music is the most absorbing of all the arts. It absorbs the mind of the artist, whether creator or executant, to the exclusion of every other consideration outside his own immediate necessities or desires.

When will you give up these mad adventures, and leave others to fight their own battles and to save their own lives as best they may?' When your ladyship has ceased to be the most admired woman in Europe, namely, when I am in my grave.

A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation's glory and his own vanity.

Look at this limp cravet. And the sad state of those cuffs. I can hardly bring myself to look upon them.