Genius is unquestionably a great trial, when it takes the romantic form, and genius and romance are so associated in the public mind that many people… - Robertson Davies

When the time came for Pompadour herself to die, she confessed, was given her viaticum, and was from that time forth forbidden to see her lover. And when her body was borne away from Versailles, Louis was thought to have behaved rather badly because he watched the sad procession from a balcony. Let no one suppose that these people lived lives that were any more free from religious and neighbourly censure than the adulterers in our smallest Canadian villages. Even wealth and privilege could not wholly insulate them from that frost.

However much science and educational theory and advanced thinking you pump into a college or a university, it always retains a strong hint of its medieval origins.

She had an ability, invaluable in a weak person, to persuade herself that whatever was inevitable had her full approval, and was in some measure her own doing.