A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his educati… - François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand

Aristocracy has three successive stages: the age of superiority, the age of privilege, and the age of vanity. Once through with the first, it degenerates into the second, and dies out in the third.

Washington went to his grave before even the smallest bit of fame attached itself to my footsteps; I passed before him as the most anonymous entity. He was in all his glory, I in all my obscurity, and I doubt whether my name stayed more than a day in his memory. I am nevertheless happy that his gaze once fell upon me. I would feel warmed by it for the rest of my life. There is a virtue in the gaze of a great man.

Thus, in my rendering, Chateaubriand may occasionally sound like Cioran (who called him “a sonorous Pascal”), or Baudelaire (who called him “one of the surest and rarest masters”), or Proust (who compared his distinctive sentences to the barn owl’s distinctive cry), or Sebald (who so seamlessly integrated passages of the Memoirs into the penultimate chapter of The Rings of Saturn).