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Updated: June 13, 2025
"Mais, mon Dieu, madame," said the impatient king. "Mais, mon Dieu, monsieur, vous croyez que je travaillerai pour le roi de Prusse, c'est-a-dire sans paiement." The king broke out into a hearty laugh, and Balby had to join him, but much against his will.
From Blois he returned to Paris; and having now mastered the French language, found great pleasure in the society of French philosophers and poets. He gave an account, in a letter to Bishop Hough, of two highly interesting conversations, one with Malbranche, the other with Boileau. Malbranche expressed great partiality for the English, and extolled the genius of Newton, but shook his head when Hobbes was mentioned, and was indeed so unjust as to call the author of the Leviathan a poor silly creature. Addison's modesty restrained him from fully relating, in his letter, the circumstances of his introduction to Boileau. Boileau, having survived the friends and rivals of his youth, old, deaf, and melancholy, lived in retirement, seldom went either to Court or to the Academy, and was almost inaccessible to strangers. Of the English and of English literature he knew nothing. He had hardly heard the name of Dryden. Some of our countrymen, in the warmth of their patriotism, have asserted that this ignorance must have been affected. We own that we see no ground for such a supposition. English literature was to the French of the age of Louis the Fourteenth what German literature was to our own grandfathers. Very few, we suspect, of the accomplished men who, sixty or seventy years ago, used to dine in Leicester Square with Sir Joshua, or at Streatham with Mrs. Thrale, had the slightest notion that Wieland was one of the first wits and poets, and Lessing, beyond all dispute, the first critic in Europe. Boileau knew just as little about the Paradise Lost, and about Absalom and Achitophel; but he had read Addison's Latin poems, and admired them greatly. They had given him, he said, quite a new notion of the state of learning and taste among the English. Johnson will have it that these praises were insincere. "Nothing," says he, "is better known of Boileau than that he had an injudicious and peevish contempt of modern Latin; and therefore his profession of regard was probably the effect of his civility rather than approbation." Now, nothing is better known of Boileau than that he was singularly sparing of compliments. We do not remember that either friendship or fear ever induced him to bestow praise on any composition which he did not approve. On literary questions, his caustic, disdainful, and self-confident spirit rebelled against that authority to which everything else in France bowed down. He had the spirit to tell Louis the Fourteenth firmly, and even rudely, that his Majesty knew nothing about poetry, and admired verses which were detestable. What was there in Addison's position that could induce the satirist, whose stern and fastidious temper had been the dread of two generations, to turn sycophant for the first and last time? Nor was Boileau's contempt of modern Latin either injudicious or peevish. He thought, indeed, that no poem of the first order would ever be written in a dead language. And did he think amiss? Has not the experience of centuries confirmed his opinion? Boileau also thought it probable, that, in the best modern Latin, a writer of the Augustan age would have detected ludicrous improprieties. And who can think otherwise? What modern scholar can honestly declare that he sees the smallest impurity in the style of Livy? Yet is it not certain that, in the style of Livy, Pollio, whose taste had been formed on the banks of the Tiber, detected the inelegant idiom of the Po? Has any modern scholar understood Latin better than Frederic the Great understood French? Yet is it not notorious that Frederic the Great, after reading, speaking, writing French, and nothing but French, during more than half a century, after unlearning his mother tongue in order to learn French, after living familiarly during many years with French associates, could not, to the last, compose in French, without imminent risk of committing some mistake which would have moved a smile in the literary circles of Paris? Do we believe that Erasmus and Fracastorius wrote Latin as well as Dr. Robertson and Sir Walter Scott wrote English? And are there not in the Dissertation on India, the last of Dr. Robertson's works, in Waverley, in Marmion, Scotticisms at which a London apprentice would laugh? But does it follow, because we think thus, that we can find nothing to admire in the noble alcaics of Gray, or in the playful elegiacs of Vincent Bourne? Surely not. Nor was Boileau so ignorant or tasteless as to be incapable of appreciating good modern Latin. In the very letter to which Johnson alludes, Boileau says, "Ne croyez pas pourtant que je veuille par l
Vous viendrez certainement a Paris cet hiver, et nous vous verrons. Je compte aller dans six semaines retrouver tout mon monde qui y est deja. Remerciez pour moi Mrs. Reeve et Hope, et croyez a tous mes meilleurs sentiments. Journal July. The building Foxholes was now going on. To Scotland, July 31st, having again taken Loch Gair. Also hired a 16-ton yacht the 'Foam. Got there on August 1st.
And twice a week he gave her a music lesson. "She has a splendid organ!" he would say. "Vous croyez?" fluted Madame Petrucci with the vilest accent and the most aggravating smile imaginable. It was the one hobby of the signorino's that she regarded with disrespect. Goneril, too, was a little bored by the music lesson; but, on the other hand, the walks delighted her.
«Ne croyez pas, dit M. d'Arcet, en faisant mention des vallées des Pyrénées, que les eaux aient pris ces routes parce qu'elles les ont trouvées frayées antérieurement
I must say that, when I looked at the ditches and high ramparts, I had a different opinion; so had a gendarme who was walking by our side, and who had observed O'Brien's scrutiny, and who quietly said to him in French, "Vous le croyez possible?" "Everything is possible to a brave man the French armies have proved that," answered O'Brien.
Ze literature n'existe pas pour ze squeak of ze pig! Ah, bah! L'art, c'est l'imagination l'ideal c'est le veritable Dieu en l'homme!" Longford gave vent to a snigger, which was his way of laughing. "God is an abstract illusion," he said "One does not introduce a non-available quantity in the summing up of facts!" "Ah! Vous ne croyez pas en Dieu?" And Gigue ruffled up his grey hair with one hand.
Ce sont de beaux hommes bourtant; point de tenue militaire, mais de grands gaillards; si je les avais dans ma compagnie de la Garde, j'en ferai de bons soldats. Canaillard. Est-il bete, cet Allemand! Les grands hommes ne font pas toujours de bons soldats, Monsieur. Il me semble que les soldats de France qui sont de ma taille, Monsieur, valent un peu mieux . . . Bobwitz. Vous croyez? Canaillard.
"Vous croyez?" fluted Madame Petrucci, with the vilest accent and the most aggravating smile imaginable. It was the one hobby of the signorino's that she regarded with disrespect. Goneril too was a little bored by the music lesson, but, on the other hand, the walks delighted her. One day Goneril was out with her friend. "Are the peasants very much afraid of you, signore?" she asked.
The heat of the day, the single glass of wine he had taken, and the hearty meal he had eaten after his morning fast, all combined to make him drowsy, and he had fallen into a half-slumber in which he saw hazily the creatures of his fancy moving behind the footlights, when the door of the dining-room opened, and he heard Laurent's words of farewell: 'Croyez moi, Madame Armstrong, c'est une affaire assez grave.
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