by
Stendhal
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- 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;
- 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.
lol
[...] 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. [...]
lol
[...] 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.
my god lol
[...] 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.
<3
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.
ha
I have learned to mistrust symmetry and the decimal system. There was once a time when I would do anything I chose for which I had ten good reasons, or again, anything for which I could find no reason not to, a time when I would not resist a dare.
I am more cautious now. I have children and responsibilities. I am suspicious of reasons and hostile to dares. The evidence suggests that nature is probably unbalanced, that ten is no truer than four, that reason does not prevail.
not sure if i totally follow her point here but i am intrigued by this style of opening sentence. and also of the idea of mistrusting the decimal system [just need to come up with a coherent theory why]
Why was everything nice he did for me a bribe or a favor, while my kindnesses to him were my duty? Now he was going to try to stall off my revelations with sausages, buy my silence with anemones. [...]
ok yeah i do feel this asymmetry
It hadn’t turned out that way. I had not been able to manage on my own—couldn’t even mail a letter or visit the Prado. But if I could feel for a man what I felt for the stranger Manolo, then how could I possibly return to my dreary husband? Compromise was one thing, hypocrisy another. I couldn’t do it: couldn’t stay in Spain, couldn’t return to Frank, couldn’t survive alone. That left me nothing. Nada.
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They say it’s worse to be ugly. I think it must only be different. If you’re pretty, you are subject to one set of assaults; if you’re plain you are subject to another. Pretty, you, may have more men to choose from, but you have more anxiety too, knowing your looks, which really have nothing to do with you, will disappear. [...]
not wrong
(Normal women. “You look perfectly normal to me,” Roxanne had said, scrutinizing me the first time I had visited her after my return from Europe. “What do you mean?” I had asked. “Your letters were very confusing. So high, and then so low. From the way you described yourself, I really thought you’d been disfigured or something. And then Frank told me you’d got sick and gone crazy.” “Crazy!” I had gasped. “A man thinks you’re crazy if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life with him!” We had laughed over that, but it was true.)
lmao