The moment the mind becomes finical the manners follow suit, and the great poet ended by studying his demeanor, inventing attitudes, looking furtively at himself in mirrors, and suiting his discourse to the particular pose which he happened to have taken up.

He was so preoccupied with the effect he wished to produce, that a practical joke, Blondet, had bet once or twice, and won the wager, that he could nonplus him at any moment by merely looking fixedly at his hair, or his boots, or the tails of his coats.
These airs and graces, which started in life with a passport of flowery youth, now seemed all the more stale and old because Melchior himself was waning.

Life in the world of fashion is quite as exhausting to men as it is to women, and perhaps the twenty years by which the duchess exceeded her lover's age, weighed more heavily upon him than upon her; for to the eyes of the world she was always handsome,--without rouge, without wrinkles, and without heart.

Alas! neither men nor women have friends who are friendly enough to warn them of the moment when the fragrance of their modesty grows stale, when the caressing glance is but an echo of the stage, when the expression of the face changes from sentiment to sentimentality, and the artifices of the mind show their rusty edges.

Genius alone renews its skin like a snake; and in the matter of charm, as in everything else, it is only the heart that never grows old.