Parisians in the Country by Honoré de Balzac
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page 23 of 311 (07%)
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shop-keepers like larks. I got off one hundred and sixty-two
Ternaux shawls at Orleans. I am sure I don't know what they will do with them, unless they return them to the backs of the sheep. "As to the article journal--the devil! that's a horse of another color. Holy saints! how one has to warble before you can teach these bumpkins a new tune. I have only made sixty-two 'Movements': exactly a hundred less for the whole trip than the shawls in one town. Those republican rogues! they won't subscribe. They talk, they talk; they share your opinions, and presently you are all agreed that every existing thing must be overturned. You feel sure your man is going to subscribe. Not a bit of it! If he owns three feet of ground, enough to grow ten cabbages, or a few trees to slice into toothpicks, the fellow begins to talk of consolidated property, taxes, revenues, indemnities,--a whole lot of stuff, and I have wasted my time and breath on patriotism. It's a bad business! Candidly, the 'Movement' does not move. I have written to the directors and told them so. I am sorry for it--on account of my political opinions. "As for the 'Globe,' that's another breed altogether. Just set to work and talk new doctrines to people you fancy are fools enough to believe such lies,--why, they think you want to burn their houses down! It is vain for me to tell them that I speak for futurity, for posterity, for self-interest properly understood; for enterprise where nothing can be lost; that man has preyed upon man long enough; that woman is a slave; that the great providential thought should be made to triumph; that a way must be found to arrive at a rational co-ordination of the social fabric, --in short, the whole reverberation of my sentences. Well, what do |
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