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Updated: June 19, 2025
I do know some curious stories about him; but I never tell tales out of school. In the meantime you are, after all, only suffering from an embarras de richesses; it's far better to have too many suitors than none at all. Come, I'll take you out shopping with me till five; then we'll have some tea, and you can go home quietly to dinner and ask Aunt Deborah's leave to join me at the French play.
Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien; Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l'aumone, Et tout en ecoutant comme le coeur se donne, Sans oser y penser je lui donnai le mien; Elle emporta ma vie, et n'en sut jamais rien." Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day, and gave no opportunity for Mr. Casaubon to show disapprobation.
But, at the same time, whenever you are asked to play deeper than you would, do not refuse it gravely and sententiously, alleging the folly of staking what would be very inconvenient to one to lose, against what one does not want to win; but parry those invitations ludicrously, 'et en badinant'. Say that, if you were sure to lose, you might possibly play, but that as you may as well win, you dread 'l'embarras des richesses', ever since you have seen what an encumbrance they were to poor Harlequin, and that, therefore, you are determined never to venture the winning above two louis a-day; this sort of light trifling way of declining invitations to vice and folly, is more becoming your age, and at the same time more effectual, than grave philosophical refusals.
But it was the misfortune of this learned gentleman, as it may be that of many learned and unlearned, that he frequently experienced, on such occasions, what Harlequin calls l'embarras des richesses; in other words, the abundance of his collection often prevented him from finding the article he sought for.
"Montreal nourrissoit de plus vastes projets...il donnoit a sa campagnie un gouvernement regulier...Par cette discipline il faisoit regner l'abondance dans son camp; les gens de guerre ne parloient, en Italie, que des richesses qu'on acqueroit a son service." Sismondi, "Histoire des Republiques Italiennes", tom. vi. c. 42.
The family relations of the Rajah of Nepaul in the East Indies are as well-known to me as is the mode of life of the greatest Spanish grandee, and it is as useful to me to know of the embarras de richesses of the one as of the splendour-environed poverty of the other. I know the position of every stranger who comes to Paris, wherever he may come from, or whatever racket he may make.
The former contains, they say, ninety thousand volumes, rather an embarrass de richesses to a hurrying traveller. I confess I was more amused by the importance with which the little old woman, who acted as concierge, talked of the "esprit mal tournu de Voltaire." The latter building adjoins the Hôtel de Ville, in the Place des Terreaux, the scene of one of the revolutionary fusillades.
Now, when Lord Normanby came to Ireland, he must have been somewhat puzzled by the very multiplicity of these expectations. It was a regular “embarras de richesses.” There was so much to give, and he so willing to give it!
His book is literally crammed with tales and anecdotes, to such a degree indeed, and most of them so good, that our principal difficulty in commencing a notice of it, is to know where to pick and choose our extracts; l'embarras des richesses, in short.
But besides this subject for legal disquisition, Bartoline's brains were also overloaded with the affair of Porteous, his violent death, and all its probable consequences to the city and community. It was what the French call l'embarras des richesses, the confusion arising from too much mental wealth.
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