d watched with such passionate
tenderness; this only child, incapable of despising her father or of
laughing at his want of education, so much was she his little
daughter.

When Cesar came to Paris, he had known how to read, write, and cipher,
and at that point his education had been arrested. There had been no
opportunity in his hard-working life of acquiring new ideas and
information beyond the perfumery trade. He had spent his time among
folk to whom science and literature were matters of indifference, and
whose knowledge was of a limited and special kind; he himself, having
no time to spare for loftier studies, became perforce a practical man.
He adopted (how should he have done otherwise?) the language, errors,
and opinions of the Parisian tradesman who admires Moliere, Voltaire,
and Rousseau on hearsay, and buys their works, but never opens them;
who will have it that the proper way to pronounce "armoire" is
"ormoire"; "or" means gold, and "moire" means silk, and women's
dresses used almost always to be made of silk, and in their cupboards
they locked up silk and gold--therefore, "ormoire" is right and
"armoire" is an innovation. Potier, Talma, Mlle. Mars, and other
actors and actresses were millionaires ten times over, and did not
live like ordinary mortals: the great tragedian lived on raw meat, and
Mlle. Mars would have a fricassee of pearls now and then--an idea she
had taken from some celebrated Egyptian actress. As to the Emperor,
his waistcoat pockets were lined with leather, so that he could take a
handful of snuff at a time; he used to ride at full gallop up the
staircase of the orangery at Versailles. Authors and artists ended in
the workhouse, the natural close to their eccentric careers; they
were, every one of them, atheists into the bargain, so that you had to
be very careful not to admit anybody of that sort into your house,
Joseph Lebas used to advert with horror to the story of his
sister-in-law Augustine, who married the artist Sommervieux.
Astronomers lived on spiders. These bright examples of the attitude of
the bourgeois mind toward philology, the drama, politics, and science
will throw light upon its breadth of view and powers of
comprehension....

Cesar's wife, who had learned to know her husband's character during
the early years of their marriage, led a life of perpetual terror; she
represented sound sense and foresight in the partnership; she was
doubt, opposition, and fear, while Cesa