Status Updates From Cousin Bette

Women always persuade men that they are lions, with a will of iron, when they are making sheep of them.

His forehead, projecting like a satyr’s, a sign of obstinate tenacity in passion, was surmounted by a jet-black head of springing hair like a virgin forest, below which a pair of clear eyes glittered, so tawny and untamed as to make it seem credible that his mother when carrying him had been frightened by a jaguar.

wonderfully hilarious section, bordering on bedroom farce, in which Mme Marneffe juggles the attentions of her husband and three admirers simultaneously!

Hulot, during this period, was one of those fine human ruins whose virility asserts itself in a kind of bushy growth of hair from ears and nose and fingers, like the moss springing up on the almost indestructible monuments of the Roman Empire.

Complicity in vice, remember this, is the real Holy Alliance in Paris. Men pursuing some financial interest in the end break away from one other; those with a vice have always a common interest.

But the sweetly prim respectability, the outer semblance of virtue, the hypocritical ways of a married woman who never spends anything, apparently, but the day-to-day housekeeping expenses, who demurs at any show of extravagance, lead men to unsignposted, unspectacular ruin, ruin all the stranger because the victim finds excuses, and cannot find a cause for his disaster.

The great men&women of the Empire,in their follies,rivalled the great aristocrats of the old régime.Under the Restoration the aristocracy has always remembered having been persecuted&robbed, &so,..become economical,careful,&provident: in fact bourgeois&inglorious.Now,1830 has completed the work of 1793. … from now on,there will be great names but no more great houses..Everything bears the stamp of personal interest.