If certain women walk straight into adultery, there are many others who cling to numerous hopes, and commit sin only after wandering through a maze of sorrows.

To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encounters only too rarely.

There are some women whose pregnancy would make some sly bachelor smile.

In family life people almost always adjust themselves to misfortune. They make a bed of it and hope makes them accept that bed, however hard it is.

There is something great and terrible about suicide.

One of the most detestable habits of Lilliputian minds is to find their own littleness in others.

How sternly we reproach virtue for its failings, how indulgent we are to the better qualities of vice!