all the men and all the women of this age believed
in good faith that they had become philosophers. It has afforded me a
constant source of indescribable recreation to study the fantastic
jargons which have sprung up like mushrooms, the obscure and forced ways
of expressing thoughts, spawned by misty self-styled science, invested
with bombastic terms and phrases alien to the genius of our language.
Not less have I diverted myself with the spectacle of all the various
passions to which humanity is subject, suddenly unleashed, playing their
parts with the freedom of emancipated imps, let loose from their
hiding-place by famous discoverers--just like those devils in the tale
of Bonaventura des Periers, whom Solomon sealed up in a caldron and
buried beneath the ground until a pack of wiseacres dug them up and sent
them scampering across the world again.[1]

The spectacle of women turned into men, men turned into women, and both
men and women turned into monkeys; all of them immersed in discoveries
and inventions and the kaleidoscopic whirligigs of fashion; corrupting
and seducing one another with the eagerness of hounds upon the scent;
vying in their lusts and ruinous extravagances; destroying the fortunes
of their families by turns; laughing at Plato and Petrarch; leaving real
sensibility to languish in disuse, and giving its respectable name to
the thinly veiled brutality of the senses; turning indecency into
decency; calling all who differ from them hypocrites, and burning
incense with philosophical solemnity to Priapus:--these things ought
perhaps to have presented themselves to my eyes in the form of a
lamentable tragedy; yet I could never see in them more than a farce,
which delighted while it stupefied me.

I have made but few intimate friendships, being of opinion that a man of
many friends is the real friend of none. Neither time, nor distance,
nor even occasional rudeness, interrupted the rare friendships which I
contracted for life, and which are still as firm as ever.

Now and then, I have given way to angry impulses on sustaining affronts
or injuries; and at such times men of phlegmatic temper are more decided
in their action than the irascible. Reflection, however, always calmed
me down; nor was I ever disposed to endure the wretchedness which comes
from fostering rancour or meditating revenge.

I am inclined to laugh both at _esprits faibles_, who believe in
everything, and at _esprits forts_, who pretend