ks of nature? Will
you be disgusted if all the maids are so beautiful as Helen; and you,
ladies, if all the lads are like Paris? Let us suppose that all wines
are excellent, will you have less desire to drink? if the partridges,
pheasants, pullets are common at all times, will you have less appetite?
I say boldly again "No!", despite the axiom of the schools, "Habit does
not make passion": and the reason, you know it, is that all the
pleasures which nature gives us are always recurring needs, necessary
enjoyments, and that the pleasures of the arts are not necessary. It is
not necessary for a man to have groves where water gushes to a height of
a hundred feet from the mouth of a marble face, and on leaving these
groves to go to see a fine tragedy. But the two sexes are always
necessary to each other. The table and the bed are necessities. The
habit of being alternately on these two thrones will never disgust you.

In Paris a few years ago people admired a rhinoceros. If there were in
one province ten thousand rhinoceroses, men would run after them only to
kill them. But let there be a hundred thousand beautiful women men will
always run after them to ... honour them.

_REASON_

At the time when all France was mad about Law's system, and Law was
controller-general, there came to him in the presence of a great
assembly a man who was always right, who always had reason on his side.
Said he to Law:

"Sir, you are the biggest madman, the biggest fool, or the biggest rogue
who has yet appeared among us; and that is saying a great deal: this is
how I prove it. You have imagined that a state's wealth can be increased
tenfold with paper; but as this paper can represent only the money that
is representative of true wealth, the products of the land and industry,
you should have begun by giving us ten times more corn, wine, cloth,
canvas, etc. That is not enough, you must be sure of your market. But
you make ten times as many notes as we have of silver and commodities,
therefore you are ten times more extravagant, or more inept, or more of
a rogue than all the comptrollers who have preceded you. This is how I
prove my major."

Hardly had he started his major than he was conducted to Saint-Lazare.

When he came out of Saint-Lazare, where he studied much and strengthened
his reason, he went to Rome; he asked for a public audience of the Pope,
on condition that he was not interrupted in his harangue; and he spoke
to the