I can understand the cruel gaiety of Cervantes’s masterpiece only through a melancholy meditation: considering the whole of human existence, weighing… - François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand

Taken collectively, the people are a poet, at once author and ardent actor of the part they play, or the part they are made to play. Their excesses come not so much from instinctual or inborn cruelty as from the unpredictable delirium of a crowd intoxicated by spectacles,

My mother, Apolline de Bedée, endowed with great wit and a prodigious imagination, was formed by reading Fénelon, Racine, and Madame de Sévigné. She was nourished on anecdotes of the Court of Louis XIV and knew all of Cyrus by heart. A small woman of large features, dark-haired and ugly, her elegant manners and lively disposition were at odds with my father’s rigidity and calm. Loving society as much as he loved solitude, as exuberant and animated as he was expressionless and cold, she possessed no taste not antagonistic to the tastes of her husband.

The heart feels, the head compares
Η καρδιά αισθάνεται. Ο νους συγκρίνει
Translation by Irene Doura-Kavadia