Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue. - Molière

MADAME PERNELLE. For slanderers abound in calumnies . . . ORGON. Mother, you'd make me damn my soul. I tell you I saw with my own eyes his shamelessness. MADAME PERNELLE. Their tongues for spitting venom never lack, There's nothing here below they'll not attack. ORGON. Your speech has not a single grain of sense. I saw it, harkee, saw it, with these eyes I saw — d'ye know what saw means? — must I say it A hundred times, and din it in your ears?

Je le soutiendrai devant tout le monde.

Bél. What is the meaning of this Eh? and what is there surprising in what I say? One is handsome enough, I imagine, to be able to say that it is not one heart only which is subject to our empire; and Dorante, Damis, Cléonte, and Lycidas may show that we have some charms. Ar. These gentlemen love you? Bél. Yes, with all their might. Ar. They have told you so? Bél. No one has taken that liberty; they have so well known to reverence me up to this day, that they never breathed a word of their love. But to offer me their hearts and to devote themselves to my services, dumb interpreters have sufficiently done their office. Ar. We hardly ever see Damis come into the house.