that make a show among them? Here is a Polish count--a retired colonel--
the deputy of my department. Quick, quick, into the fire with these
proofs of vanity! and let us put this card in the handwriting of our
office-boy, this direction for cheap dinners, and the receipt of the
broker where I bought my last armchair, in their place. These
indications of my poverty will serve, as Montaigne says, 'mater ma
superbe', and will always make me recollect the modesty in which the
dignity of the lowly consists.

I have stopped before the prints hanging upon the wall. This large and
smiling Pomona, seated on sheaves of corn, and whose basket is
overflowing with fruit, only produces thoughts of joy and plenty; I was
looking at her the other day, when I fell asleep denying such a thing as
misery. Let us give her as companion this picture of Winter, in which
everything tells of sorrow and suffering: one picture will modify the
other.

And this Happy Family of Greuze's! What joy in the children's eyes!
What sweet repose in the young woman's face! What religious feeling in
the grandfather's countenance! May God preserve their happiness to them!
but let us hang by its side the picture of this mother, who weeps over an
empty cradle. Human life has two faces, both of which we must dare to
contemplate in their turn.

Let me hide, too, these ridiculous monsters which ornament my
chimneypiece. Plato has said that "the beautiful is nothing else than
the visible form of the good." If it is so, the ugly should be the
visible form of the evil, and, by constantly beholding it, the mind
insensibly deteriorates.