Society being divided in strips like bamboo, the great business of a man is to ascend to the class superior to his own, and all the effort of this cl… - Stendhal

I forgot to illustrate this salon. Sir Walter Scott, and his imitators, would have started with that, but for me, I abhor material description. The trouble of making them prevents me from writing novels.

Your career will be a painful one. I divine something in you which offends the vulgar.

This beautiful thought, of 'dying close by that which one loves', expressed in a hundred different ways, was followed by a sonnet in which it was found that the soul, separated, after atrocious torments, from the frail body in which it dwelt for twenty-three years, and impelled by that instinct for happiness natural to all that has once existed, would not reascend to heaven to mingle with angelic choirs as soon as it was set free, and in the event of the awful judgment according it forgiveness for its sins, but, happier after death than it had been in life, it would go a few steps from the prison where it had lamented for so long, to be reunited with all that it had loved in the world. And thus, the sonnet's last line went. I shall have found my paradise on earth.