Ruin and death must strike down the loved one; and, what is most significant of all, death even here not by necessity, but by etiquette.

What a world of prurient corruption lies visible in that super-sublime of modesty! Yet, on the whole, our good Saint-Pierre is musical, poetical though most morbid: we will call his Book the swan-song of old dying France.
Louvet's again, let no man account musical.

Truly, if this wretched Faublas is a death-speech, it is one under the gallows, and by a felon that does not repent.

Wretched cloaca of a Book; without depth even as a cloaca! What 'picture of French society' is here?
Picture properly of nothing, if not of the mind that gave it out as some sort of picture.
Yet symptom of much; above all, of the world that could nourish itself thereon..