"What fortunes we could get!" Zelie had now reached her highest point of incandescence, and was really alarming.
"Yes," replied Minard, "but ours is made." "Don't you think, sister," said Brigitte to Madame Thuillier, "that we had better take coffee in the salon ?" Madame Thuillier obediently assumed the air of mistress of the house, and rose.
"Ah! you are a great wizard," said Flavie Colleville, accepting la Peyrade's arm to return to the salon.
"And yet I care only to bewitch you," he answered.

"I think you more enchanting than ever this evening." "Thuillier," she said, to evade the subject, "Thuillier made to think himself a political character! oh! oh!" "But, my dear Flavie, half the absurdities of life are the result of such conspiracies; and men are not alone in these deceptions.

In how many families one sees the husband, children, and friends persuading a silly mother that she is a woman of sense, or an old woman of fifty that she is young and beautiful.

Hence, inconceivable contrarieties for those who go about the world with their eyes shut.

One man owes his ill-savored conceit to the flattery of a mistress; another owes his versifying vanity to those who are paid to call him a great poet.
Every family has its great man; and the result is, as we see it in the Chamber, general obscurity of the lights of France.