United States or Canada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The Shagreen Skin is Candide with Beranger's notes; it is poverty, luxury, faith, mockery; it is the heartless breast, the brainless cranium of the nineteenth century the century so bedizened and scented, so revolutionary, so ill-read, so little worth, the century of brilliant phantasmagorias, of which in fifty years' time nothing will be seizable except Monsieur de Balzac's Shagreen Skin."
So, you see, it was one thing to give a man tools and leave him to achieve with them a specified end, working toward the desired result as he went along; and quite another to invent a brainless device that would mechanically reach the same end. Numberless difficulties must be overcome. To manufacture watches in quantity it was imperative that the parts be interchangeable.
"We have still to decide how to remove the blocks of marble," suggested Inga anxiously. "Fasten a rope to them, and pull," said Bilbil. "Don't pay any more attention to Rinkitink, for he is no wiser than the man who wrote that brainless scroll. Just get the rope, and we'll fasten Rinkitink to one end of it for a weight and I'll help you pull." "Thank you, Bilbil," replied the boy.
The stoat, plus a new carmine decoration for gallantry, remembered an urgent appointment down a rat-hole, and kept it. Perhaps it was a young stoat, and had not learnt that there are at least four degrees of cock-pheasant, namely, young and brainless, adult and brave, old and brave and cunning, and old and decrepit; but the last stage is a rare bird.
Rose, naturally, could not reflect that a young creature like herself, fighting against the world, as we call it, has all her faculties at the utmost stretch, and is often betrayed by failing nature when the will is still valiant. And here she sat-in chains! 'Yes! I am fit only to be the wife of an idle brainless man, with money and a title, she said, in extreme self- contempt.
Both were agreed that the monsters were practically brainless, that there was no room for reason in their tiny cranial cavities, and that if they have disappeared from the rest of the world it was assuredly on account of their own stupidity, which made it impossible for them to adapt themselves to changing conditions.
I am a true son of this enlightened age, and shall not, like the knights of the olden time, storm heaven and earth because my wife has a lover. I am a philosopher. For a noble wife, who had made me happy in her love, I might perhaps feel and act differently. I, however, married a heartless fool, and it would have been mad folly to risk my life with a brainless fop for her sake."
I am not yet twenty and it seems to me that I have lived thousands of years, and exhausted every sensation. I have seen every thing, learned every thing, experienced every thing; and I am tired of every thing, and satiated and nauseated. You see me looking like a brainless hoyden, I sing, I jest, I talk slang. My gayety surprises everybody. In reality, I am literally tired to death.
But do you think I will see the fruit of years of planning, do you think that I will see the reward of this brain this! this, you brainless idiot, who know not what a brain is" and he tapped his brow repeatedly with an earnestness almost grotesque "do you think that I will see this cast away, because you swill, swine that you are! Swill and prate in your cups!" "'Fore God, I said nothing!"
He was indeed such a man as a brainless or sensual woman could yield to with ease. He had an insinuating animal grace, that physical handsomeness which marks so many of the Tziganies who fill the red coats of a Gipsy musical sextette!
Word Of The Day