happy feasters like, say, the Italians
They consider their language to be the most elegant, their culture to be the most refined, their diplomacy to be the most diplomatic, their wines to be the most aristocratic, and their gastronomy to be the most subtle ..
nobody takes you seriously in France unless you can produce an electricity bill.
Outside Paris, the English are usually treated with courtesy.
The French intellect is quick and active. It flashes its way into a subject with the rapidity of lightning; seizes upon remote conclusions with a sudden bound, and its deductions are almost intuitive.
An Englishman is more reflective in his habits. He lives in the world of his own thoughts, and seems more self-existent and self-dependent .. he moves about shy and solitary, and, as it were, buttoned up, body and soul.
The French are great optimists; they seize upon every good as it flies, and revel in the passing pleasure.
The Englishman, is expensive in his habits, and expensive in his enjoyments. He values everything, whether useful or ornamental, by what it costs. He has no satisfaction in show, unless it be solid and complete.
All is clatter and chatter. He is good-humored and talkative with his servants, sociable with his neighbors, and complaisant to all the world.
The Englishman ensconces himself in a snug brick mansion, which he has all to himself; puts broken bottles along his walls, shrouds himself with trees and window-curtains; exults in his quiet and privacy
The (French) are full of sensibility; easily moved, and prone to sudden and great excitement; but their excitement is not durable
the English are more phlegmatic; not so readily affected, but capable of being aroused to great enthusiasm
provided the national flag is victorious, he cares little about the expense, the injustice, or the inutility of the war
He is a moral person, and makes war upon his neighbor for the maintenance of peace and good order, and sound principles.He is a money-making personage ..
While the French made enthusiastic explorers and relentless missionaries, they were reluctant colonists and indifferent farmers.
for the French, discipline is in no way a sacred thing, and neither is docility. French people are rebellious by nature, and for them, disobeying the law is a national sport..
In France, such behaviour amuses people with soft hearts, and while pretending to condemn it, Claudine is really approved, a nice little girl, so happy and natural.
We like it when our merits are praised, yet we don't do anything to call attention to them
A young French boy will not have the slightest sense of guilt if he gets away without punishment! And his friends will congratulate him for his craftiness or his luck.
The French talk a lot, about everything and anything.
French teenage boys don't drink so much; they're busier polishing their seduction skills.
whoever knows life in Paris ... will find it a succession of excitements, temporary, yet varied,--full of the agreeable, yet barren of consecutive interest and satisfactory results
In every phase of life, manners, and action, we see a characteristic excellence in detail and process, and an equally remarkable deficiency in grand practical idea and consistent moral sentiment.
confirms the sway of the conventional, so as to give la mode the force of social law to an extent unknown elsewhere.
The superiority of the French in the minor philosophy of life was curiously exemplified during our Revolutionary War.
the English regretted London fogs and beer, and made themselves and their hosts, uncomfortable. They exhibited no tact or facility in improving the resources at hand, and relied only on brute force to win advantage.
What bullyism is to the English, shrewdness to the Yankee, and intrigue to the Italian, is "finesse", which is a union of insight and address, to the French.
What bullyism is to the English, shrewdness to the Yankee, and intrigue to the Italian, is "finesse", which is a union of insight and address, to the French.
What bullyism is to the English, shrewdness to the Yankee, and intrigue to the Italian, is "finesse", which is a union of insight and address, to the French.
What bullyism is to the English, shrewdness to the Yankee, and intrigue to the Italian, is "finesse", which is a union of insight and address, to the French.
It is curious how municipal, economical, and social life are thus simultaneously daguerreotyped and indicate their mutual and intricate association in the French capital.
Throughout the most salient eras of this history .. is visible female influence. .. Even now, although "no lady brings her distaff to the council-chamber," the influence of the sex on political opinion is recognized.
one instinctively recognizes a Frenchwoman by her clean boots, even in the muddiest thoroughfare .. She retains also her individuality after marriage better than the fair of other nations..
the French mind .. assimilates elements within its sphere which in other nations are kept comparatively apart, (but) rejects the process in regard to foreign material.
how exact the evolutions of a French regiment, and the statements of a French naturalist! how apt is a Parisian woman in raising gracefully her skirts, throwing on a shawl, or carrying a basket!
To a Frenchman," says Mrs. Jameson, "the words that express things seem the things themselves, and he pronounces the words 'amour, grace, sensibilite', etc., with a relish in his mouth as if he tasted them
Government, religion, and society have nowhere been so modified by the dominion of fancy over fact... ;what perspicuity in the expression, and vagueness in the realization of ideas!
The popular writers are eloquent in abstractions, but each seems inspired by a thorough egotism.
wholesome sense of the enjoyable and the available in ordinary life, in its freedom from the discontent which elsewhere is born of avarice and unmitigated materialism
The amount of commodities taken by French people on a journey, and the cool self-satisfaction with which they are appropriated as occasion demands, give a stranger the most vivid idea of sensual egotism.
the superior honesty and bluntness and the inferior smoothness and assimilating instinct of the Anglo-Saxon
the inferior smoothness and assimilating instinct of the Anglo-Saxon,--a vital difference, which no alliance or intercourse with his Gallic neighbors can essentially change.
Comedy is native to French genius and appreciation; it follows the changes of social life with marvellous celerity .. It is quite the reverse with the serious drama.
serious drama .. in England is a form of literature which goes nearest to the normal facts and conditions of human nature; it teaches the highest and deepest lessons, wins the most profound sympathy,
they offer academic prizes for every conceivable achievement; their very lamp-posts are designed with taste .. And yet in the more earnest developments of the soul, (they are) children
French historic Art, like French life, is apt to be extravagant and melodramatic, or over-refined in unimportant particulars; it often lacks moral harmony,--the grand, simple, true reflection of Nature in its nicety
there may be said to be no such thing as popular literature in France; mental recreation, such as the German and Scotch peasantry enjoy, is unknown there.
mental recreation, such as the German and Scotch peasantry enjoy, is unknown there.
Who but Frenchmen ever delighted in reducing to artificial shapes the graceful forms of vegetable life, or can so far lay aside the sentiment of grief as to engage in rhetorical panegyrics over the fresh graves of departed friends?
the perpetual flowering in manners, in philosophy, in politics, and in economy, is rarely accompanied by fruit in either.
The bearing of an Englishman seldom awakens expectation of courtesy or entertainment; yet, if vouchsafed, how to be relied on is the friendship! how generous the hospitality!
the roughest backwoodsman in America, who never touched his hat or inclined his body to a stranger, will guard a woman from insult, and incommode himself to promote her comfort
The want of directness, the absence of candor, the non-recognition of truth in its broad and deep sense, is, indeed, a characteristic phase of life, of expression, and of manners in France
In every aspect the histrionic prevails
They rally at the voice of command, submit to interference, and take for granted a prescribed formula, partly because it is troublesome to think, and partly on account of inexperience in assuming responsibility
It's good humour and cordiality that makes daily life so agreable in America. .. One senses a regulation, a system. "Cheer up! Take it easy."
In America the individual is nothing. He is the subject of an abstract cult
one of the virtues of the Americans is that they are never vulgar; they have a spontaneous sense of human dignity which prevents them from seeking out differences;
such silence may be despondent, but I prefer it to these elegant spirallings, to these wordy arabesques which tirelessly rise and die in emptiness like disappointing ectoplasms
Sooner than any other race the French have got rid of bogies, have "cleared the mind of shams," and gone up to the Medusa and the Sphinx with a cool eye and a penetrating question.
no peopIe on earth, when they settle in a new country, are more eager than the Germans to adopt its ways, and to be taken for native-born citizens.
The French have never taken the trouble to disguise their Frenchness from foreigners
The Frenchman and the American want to have a voice in governing their country, and the German prefers to be governed by professionals, as long as they make him comfortable and give him what he wants
The Frenchman and the American want to have a voice in governing their country, and the German prefers to be governed by professionals
the blackberry has been condemned untried because of some ancient taboo that the French peasant dares not disregard. Taboos of this sort are as frequent in France as the blackberries in the hedges
Everything connected with dinnergiving has an almost sacramental importance in France.
The French care passionately for ideas, but they do not expert women to have them
It is a ruIe of French society that host and hostess shall sit exactly opposite each other. .. an Academician must sit on his hostess' right, unless there is a Duke or an Ambassador or a Bishop present..
ln England, where precedence has, at any rate, the support of a court, where it is, so to speak, still a "going concern," and works automatically, the hostess, if she is a woman of the worId, casts it to the winds on informaI occasions
two strong passions: Pious love of every yard of the soil and every stone of the houses. .. Intense dread lest any internal innovations should weaken the social structure and open a door to the enemy. ..
Suitability - fitness - is, and always has been, the very foundation of French standards. .. French people "have taste" as naturally as they breathe
England's standards are all implicit. She does not feel the French need of formulating and tabulating
The French always want to find out first just what the conceptions they are fighting for are worth .. it is because of her dauntless curiosity that France is of all countries the most grown up. ..
They take the normal pleasures, physical and aesthetic, "in their stride," so to speak, as wholesome, nourishing, and necessary .. and not as subjects for nasty prying or morbid self-examination.
The French are intrinsically a tough race: they are careless of pain, unafraid of risks, contemptuous of precautions.
The French are persuaded that the enjoyment of beauty and the exercise of the critical ntelligence are two of the things best worth living for
.No race is so little addicted to fads, for fads are generally untested propositions. The French tendency is to test every new theory, religious, artistic or scientific, in the light of wide knowledge and experience, and to adapt it only if it stands this scrutiny
The money necessary to security had to be accumulated slowly and painfully, so the Frenchman learned to be industrious, and to train his children to industry
to Anglo-Saxon eyes, the niggardliness of the French is their most incomprehensîble trait.
The French are kind in the sense of not being cruel, but they are not kindly, in the sense of diffused benevolence which the word implies to Anglo-Saxons. They are passionate and yet calculating,
they are not kindly, in the sense of diffused benevolence which the word implies to Anglo-Saxons
little as they care to rise in the world, they have an unspeakable terror of faIIing, based partIy, no doubt, on the pitiful fate, in France, of those who do fall. This point assured, they want only enough leisure .. to enjoy what life and the arts of life offer.
..ln France, as soon as a woman has a personality, social circumstances permit her to make it felt
On her wedding-day she ceases, in any open, frank and recognised manner, to be an influence in the lives of the men of the community to which she belongs.
To put a panache - a plume, an ornament - on a prosaic deed is an act so eminently French that one seeks in vain for its English.equivalent .. the whole conception of "la gloire" is linked with the profoundly French conviction that the lily should be gilded..
the Anglo-Saxon is taught not to do great deeds for "glory," while the French, unsurpassed in great deeds, have always avowedly done them for "la gloire."
"Amour", to the French, means the undivided total of the complex sensations and emotions that a man and a woman may inspire in each other
It is because the French have refused to cut love in two that they have not attempted to subordinate it to the organisation of the family ..they allow it, frankly and amply, the part it furtively and shabbily, but no less ubiquitously, plays in Puritan societies.
difference between the Latin and Anglo-Saxon conceptions of marriage
They do not care for the raw material of sensation: food must be exquisitely cooked, emotion eloquently expressed, desire emotionally heightened, every experience must be transmuted into terms of beauty before it touches their imagination.
comfort is an Anglo-Saxon invention which the Latins have never really understood or felt the want of.
This fastidiousness, this tendency always to select and eliminate, and refine their sensations, is united to that stoic indifference to dirt, discomfort, bad air, damp, cold, and whatever Anglo-Saxons describe as "inconvenience"
their almost Chinese reverence for the ritual of manners.
The French gentleman .. is shocked by the way in which Americans loll and sprawl when they are seated, and equally bewildered by their excess of ceremony on some occasions, and their startling familiarity on others.
The French think the sin against the public conscience far graver than that against any private person. .. The French are as a race indifferent to the rights of others. ..The French are not generous, and they are not trustful.
This system of punishment is the result of a purely Latin and social conception of order. ln it individualism has no place.
the French conscience rejects with abhorrence the business complaisances which the rigidly virtuous American too often regards as not immoral because not indictable.