The ordinary procedure of the nineteenth century is that when a powerful and noble personage encounters a man of feeling, he kills, exiles, imprisons or so humiliates him that the other, like a fool, dies of grief.

Wounded pride can take a rich young man far who is surrounded by flatterers since birth.

Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.

It is with blows dealt by public contempt that a husband kills his wife in the nineteenth century; it is by shutting the doors ofall the drawing-rooms in her face.

Mathematics allows for no hypocrisy and no vagueness.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

She had caprices of a marvellous unexpectedness, and how is any one to imitate a caprice?