[...] honest clear-sightedness, which quality is a compensatory gift to a child who has spent years observing, with satirical and unforgiving eyes, the hypocrisies and injustices of grown-ups; who has had, in order to survive, to learn watchfulness, which is the first qualification for a writer. The observation of their enemies, mother, father, authority figures, teaches these unhappy children how to dissemble or keep silent -- and see everything.

1. a likeable, excellent fellow, handsome but devoid of wit, M. Barot, a banker from Charleville, then busy gaining a fortune of eighty thousand francs' annual income;
2. an officer retired on half-pay, decorated at Waterloo, absolutely deprived of wit, and if such a thing is possible, even more of imagination, foolish, but with perfect manners, and having had so many women that he had become sincere on their subject.

[...] He was defending, as a solicitor, one of those poor idiots who get involved in conspiracy when they have only two thirds or three quarters of the courage needed for such a preposterous action. [...]

[...] This Mme Lavenelle is as dry as a piece of parchment and in any case has no wit, and above all no passion, and it's quite impossible for her to be affected other than by the sturdy thighs of a company of grenadiers parading through the garden of the Tuileries in white kerseymere knickerbockers.

[...] When I left Lussinge the most dismal time of the day would begin for me. I went, in that year's great heat, to seek the shade and a little coolness beneath the great chestnut trees of the Tuileries. 'Since I can't forget her, wouldn't I do better to kill myself?' I'd think. Everything was burdensome to me. I still had in 1821 that residual passion for painting in Italy which had made me write on that subject in 1816 and '17. I'd got to the Museum with a ticket that Lussinge had procured for me. The sight of those masterpieces merely reminded me all the more intensely of Brera and Metilde. When I came across the corresponding French name in a book, I would change color.

He had learnt music in the same way that a scholar from the Academy of Inscriptions learns or pretends to learn Persian. He had learnt to admire such and such a piece, the first quality always lay in a sound that was just right, in a phrase that was perfectly correct.