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Updated: May 15, 2025
This man belongs to the Contradictors, persons who note errata in memoirs, rectify dates, correct facts, bet a hundred to one, and are certain about everything. You can easily detect them in some gross blunder in the course of a single evening.
They will tell you they were in Paris at the time of Mallet's conspiracy, forgetting that half an hour earlier they had described how they had crossed the Beresina. Nearly all Contradictors are "chevaliers" of the Legion of honor; they talk loudly, have retreating foreheads, and play high. "Madame Firmiani a hundred thousand francs a year? nonsense, you are crazy!
In the relations of private life to call him amiable would not be using too strong a word, and he was very indulgent to the weakness of human nature. The contrary opinion is too firmly fixed in some minds for me to hope to root it out. I shall, I fear, have contradictors, but I address myself to those who look for truth.
He who will establish this proposition by authority and huffing discovers his reason to be very weak. For a verbal and scholastic altercation let them have as much appearance as their contradictors; "Videantur sane, non affirmentur modo;" but in the real consequence they draw from it these have much the advantage.
Bad behavior the laws cannot reach. Society is invested with rude, cynical, restless, and frivolous persons who prey upon the rest, and whom a public opinion concentrated into good manners, forms accepted by the sense of all, can reach; the contradictors and railers at public and private tables, who are like terriers, who conceive it the duty of a dog of honor to growl at any passer-by, and do the honors of the house by barking him out of sight; I have seen men who neigh like a horse when you contradict them, or say something which they do not understand; then the overbold, who make their own invitation to your hearth; the persevering talker, who gives you his society in large, saturating doses; the pitiers of themselves, a perilous class; the frivolous Asmodeus, who relies on you to find him in ropes of sand to twist; the monotones; in short, every stripe of absurdity; these are social inflictions which the magistrate cannot cure or defend you from, and which must be intrusted to the restraining force of custom, and proverbs, and familiar rules of behavior impressed on young people in their school-days.
I only repeat what Blansac himself reported in his defence, which was equally ill-received by the King and the public, but which had no contradictors, for nobody was witness of what took place at Blenheim except those actually there, and they all, the principals at least, agreed in their story. What some of the soldiers said was not of a kind that could altogether be relied upon.
I only repeat what Blansac himself reported in his defence, which was equally ill-received by the King and the public, but which had no contradictors, for nobody was witness of what took place at Blenheim except those actually there, and they all, the principals at least, agreed in their story. What some of the soldiers said was not of a kind that could altogether be relied upon.
In the relations of private life to call him amiable would not be using too strong a word, and he was very indulgent to the weakness of human nature. The contrary opinion is too firmly fixed in some minds for me to hope to root it out. I shall, I fear, have contradictors, but I address myself to those who look for truth.
Certainly at the Conference his practice was to meet the more powerful of his contradictors on their own ground and come to terms with them, so as to get at least a part of what he aimed at, and that he accepted, even when the instalment was accorded to him not as such, but as a final settlement.
When one of these highly destined servants of the Great King fails in his duty, when he cannot pardon the sinner, when he looks churlishly upon a child, or condemns the innocent amusements of the young and happy, when he makes the sweet Sabbath a day of penance instead of praise of tyranny instead of rest, when he has no charity for backsliders, no sympathy for the sorrowful, no toleration for the contradictors of his own particular theory do we not feel that his very existence is a blasphemy, and his preaching a presumption!"
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