But, if I sample this pleasure so prudently and circumspectly, it will no longer be a pleasure.

The French are the wittiest, the most charming, and up to the present, at all events, the least musical race on Earth.

Prudery is a kind of avarice, the worst of all.

The tyranny of public opinion (and what an opinion!) is as fatuous in the small towns of France as it is in the United States of America.

On a cold winter morning a cigar fortifies the soul.

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.

I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered.