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Updated: July 10, 2025
It is simply understood that on such an evening, the season through, a lady receives her friends. All come that please, without ceremony. A little table is set out with tea and a plate of cake. Behind it presides some fairy Emma or Elizabeth, dispensing tea and talk, bonbons and bon-mots, with equal grace.
Such jokes as she made and such laughter as she managed to elicit through the medium of the smallest of them, and such aptness and tact as she displayed in keeping up the general fusillade of bon-mots and repartee.
She looked at mankind from a cynical altitude of worldly wisdom; her wit grew keen and swift as d'Artagnan's rapier; her bon-mots had a way of passing into proverbs, or of being stolen by more distinguished contemporaries. She took her revenge upon society as completely as she could, yet without bitterness.
His sons had asked him to write a critical account of the greatest rhetoricians he had known; he gladly acceded to their wish, and has embodied in his work vast numbers of extracts, drawn either from memory or rough notes, specifying the manner in which each professor treated his theme; he then adds his own judgment on their merits, often interspersing the more tedious discussions with bon-mots or literary anecdotes.
Lemuel Williams, his brother lawyer, had perhaps a subtler wit. But the way Warren would go on, for a whole evening, letting off bon-mots, repartees, and puns, made one think of a magazine of pyrotechnics. Yet he was a man of serious thought and fine intellectual powers. He was an able lawyer, and, placed upon the bench at an uncommonly, early age, he sustained himself with honor.
He could not keep them in; envy and jealousy urged him to utter them, and as his bon-mots always went straight to the point, they were always much repeated. We were on terms of continual intimacy; he had rendered me real solid friendly services of himself, and I paid him all sorts of respectful attentions, and he paid me the same.
Thus, in no other capital are politics and literature so interwoven with society; the love-affairs of a minister directly influence his policy; the tone of the salon often inspires and moulds the author; the social history of an epoch necessarily includes the genius of its statesmanship and of its letters, because they are identified with the intrigues, the bon-mots, and the conversation of the period; more is to be learned at a lady's morning reception or evening soiree than in the writer's library or the official's cabinet.
They were as old as the world, but they were new to me, and I was amused and astonished. These bon-mots were followed by an account of how Gautier wrote his Sunday feuilleton, and how he and Balzac had once nearly come to blows. They had agreed to collaborate. Balzac was to contribute the scenario, Gautier the dialogue. One morning Balzac came with the scenario of the first act.
And thus, by degrees, we found ourselves bewildered by the most vivid contrasts and apparently irreconcilable traits, until the original idea of a Frenchman expanded to the widest range of associations, from the ingenious devices of a mysterious cuisine to the brilliant manoeuvres of the battle-field; infinite female tact, rare philosophic hardihood, inimitable bon-mots, exquisite millinery, consummate generalship, holy fortitude, refined profligacy, and intoxicating sentiment, Ude, Napoleon, Madame Recamier, Pascal, Ninon de I'Enclos, and Rousseau.
But the Baroness believed much in propinquity; and she brought the rector and Alice together as often as possible, and coached the girl in coquettish arts when alone with her, and credited her with witticisms and bon-mots which she had never uttered, when talking of her to the young rector. "If only I could give Alice the benefit of my past career," the Baroness would say to herself at times.
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