Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 9, 2025
Several years before his grace died, he was well known to have expressed some concern for the libertinism of his youth, especially regarding the fair sex, in which he had indulged himself himself very freely. He was survived only by one legitimate son, but left several natural children;
The news of this nomination was received with strange joy. Roderigo Borgia had the reputation of a dissolute man, it is true, but libertinism had mounted the throne with Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII, so that for the Romans there was nothing new in the singular situation of a pope with a mistress and five children.
The thought was suggested by themselves; and, had you or I or any of us vile marriage haters been declaiming against the saffron god, and his eternal shackles, I doubt whether the best of us could have said any thing half so much to the purpose! Is it not excellent? Then had you heard me preach, ay, me myself, against libertines and libertinism!
He then returned to his privy council and read a long statement, very carefully drawn up, minutely recapitulating the conduct of Alexis, his indolence, his shameless libertinism, his low companionship, his treasonable designs, and exhibiting his utter unfitness, in all respects, to be entrusted with the government of an empire.
In them, as in the celebrated Psychomachy of Prudence, the Christian virtues meet with the shadows of forgotten gods, Holy Faith is linked to Idolatry, Humility and Pride go hand in hand, and Libertinism seeks shelter beneath the veils of Modesty. This thirst for the Supreme Good will in time find its appeasement in the just reforms brought by an organised democracy to a long-suffering people.
"I am now alluding to circumstances which came to my knowledge long after; but it is necessary, my dearest child, that you should know the character of your father, to prevent your despising your mother; the only parent inclined to discharge a parent's duty. In London, George had acquired habits of libertinism, which he carefully concealed from his father and his commercial connections.
Sanguinary laws were enacted against libertinism; profane pictures were burned; drapery was put on indecorous statues; the theatres were shut up; fast-days were numerous; and the Parliament resolved that no person should be admitted into any public employment, unless the House should be first satisfied of his vital godliness. We know what was the end of this training.
Alfred de Musset's first steps in life were made at the same time with his first essays in poetry. He was so handsome, high-spirited and gay that women did not wait to hear that he was a genius to smile upon him. His brother, who is tall, calls him of medium height, five feet four inches (about five feet nine, English measure), slender, well-made and of good carriage: his eyes were blue and full of fire; his nose was aquiline, like the portraits of Vandyke; his profile was slightly equine in type: the chief beauty of his face was his forehead, round which clustered the many-shaded masses of his fair hair, which never turned gray: the countenance was mobile, animated and sensitive; the predominating expression was pride. Paul relates without reserve how one married woman encouraged his brother and trifled with him, using his devotion to screen a real intrigue which she was carrying on, and that another, who was lying in wait for him, undertook his consolation. One morning Alfred made his appearance in spurs, with his hat very much on one side and a huge bunch of hair on the other, by which signs his brother understood that his vanity was satisfied. He was just eighteen. That a man of respectable life and notions like Paul de Musset should take these adventures as a matter of course makes it difficult for an American to find the point of view whence to judge a society so abominably corrupt. Thus at the age of a college-boy in this country he was started on the career which was destined to lead to so much unhappiness, and in the end to his destruction. Dissipation of every sort followed, debts, from which he was never free, and the habit of drinking, which proved fatal at last. To the advice and warnings of his brother he only replied that he wished to know everything by experience, not by hearsay that he felt within him two men, one an actor, the other a spectator, and if the former did a foolish thing the latter profited by it. On this pernicious reasoning he pursued for three years a dissolute mode of life, which, thanks to the remarkable strength and elasticity of his constitution, did not prevent his carrying on his studies and going with great zest into society, where he became more and more welcome, besides writing occasionally. He translated De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, introducing some reveries of his own, but the work attracted no attention. During this period his father, naturally anxious about his son's unprofitable courses, one morning informed him that he had obtained a clerkship for him in an office connected with the military commissariat. Alfred did not venture to demur, but the confinement and routine of an office were intolerable, and he resolved to conquer his liberty by every effort of which he was capable. He offered his manuscripts for publication to M. Canel, the devoted editor of the romantic party: they fell short by five hundred lines of the number of pages requisite for a volume of the usual octavo bulk. He obtained a holiday, which he spent with a favorite uncle who lived in the provinces, and came back in three weeks with the poem of "Mardoche." He persuaded his father to give a literary party, to which his friends of the Cénacle were invited, and repeated his latest compositions to them, including "Mardoche." Here we have another example of manners startling to our notions: the keynote of these verses was rank libertinism, yet in his mother's drawing-room and apparently in the presence of his father, a dignified, reputable man, venerated by his children, this young rake declaimed stanzas more licentious than any in Byron's Don Juan. But it caused no scandal: the friends were rapturous, and predicted the infallible success of the poems, in which they were justified by the event. "Rarely," says Paul de Musset, "has so small a quantity of paper made so much noise." There was an uproar among the newspapers, some applauding with all their might, others denouncing the exaggeration of the romantic tendency: the romanticists themselves were disconcerted to find the "Ballade
Jefferson, never failing to place his libertinism in strong relief against the approved morals of George III., of several passages in whose history it is charitable to suppose he was ignorant; prayed fervently on Sunday; decried all morals, institutions, churches, manners but those of England from Monday to Saturday."
Besides, she lets only one trait of her character be known, and that the only one which renders her blamable; her noble virtues are hidden; she prefers to glory in her naive libertinism. Most incompletely rendered in dramas and tales where she is put upon the scene with all her poesy, she is nowhere really true but in her garret; elsewhere she is invariably calumniated or over-praised.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking