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A gift of books indeed was a passport to his favour, and before the title of each volume he possessed the Duke wrote words which expressed his love of them, "moun bien mondain," "my worldly goods"! Lydgate tells us how "notwithstanding his state and dignyte his corage never doth appalle to studie in books of antiquitie."
As to MONDAIN, and "remark" upon it, the ghost of what was once a sparkle of successful coterie-speech and epistolary allusion, take this: "In the MONDAIN Voltaire had written, 'LE PARADIS TERRESTRE EST OU JE SUIS; and as the Priests made outcry, had with airs of orthodoxy explained the phrase away," as Friedrich now affects to do; obliquely quizzing, in the Friedrich manner.
At that time he was a popular priest mondain, clever and eloquent. At Meaux he is a power. No figure is so familiar in the picturesque old streets, especially on market day, Saturday, as this tall, powerful-looking man in his soutane and barrette, with his air of authority, familiar yet dignified.
In landscape and cattle-painting the types are similar, while Belgian figure-painting gains by the lack of the element which a French critic notes when he says modern art has become mondain surtout demi-mondain.
The World Even the world, so mondain as it is, still holds instinctively and as a matter of faith unquestionable that those who have died by the altar are worthier than those who have lived by it, when to die was duty. Blasphemy I begin to understand now what Christ meant when he said that blasphemy against the Holy Ghost was unforgiveable, while speaking against the Son of Man might be forgiven.
M. Saint-Amand declares that "isolated from her contemporaries, Catherine de' Medici is a monster; brought back within the circle of their passions and their theories, she once more becomes a woman." She was not only the type of her civilization,—brutal, gross, immoral, elegant, polished, and mondain,—but she was also its leader.
In his 'Memorial d'un Mondain' Lamberg refers to Casanova as 'a man known in literature, a man of profound knowledge. In the first edition of 1774, he laments that 'a man such as M. de S. Galt' should not yet have been taken back into favour by the Venetian government, and in the second edition, 1775, rejoices over Casanova's return to Venice.
In his 'Memorial d'un Mondain' Lamberg refers to Casanova as 'a man known in literature, a man of profound knowledge. In the first edition of 1774, he laments that 'a man such as M. de S. Galt' should not yet have been taken back into favour by the Venetian government, and in the second edition, 1775, rejoices over Casanova's return to Venice.
He was the most generous of men, and particularly he could not bear to see a pretty girl in sincere distress through no fault of her own. It was Dulcie's simple sincerity that pleased him. He came across very little of it in his own world. That world was brilliant, distinguished, sometimes artistic, sometimes merely mondain. But it was seldom sincere. He liked that quality best of all.