Je me sauve à la nage, I am swimming about

11.25, 28. poicr avoir trouvé. . .pour V avoir employée — parce quHl avait trouvé... parce qié" il r avait employée. Balzac did for French prose what Malherbe did for poetry. He has certainly the rare talent of selecting the most appropriate words, of arranging them in the best order, and of observing strictly ail the laws af harmony ; he has contributed more than anybody else perhaps to purify the vocabulary; but his sesquipedalia verba are too often a mère jingle. The witty line of Maynard may be construed into an expression of praise or the reverse ; at any i-ate it is perfectly descriptive of Balzac.

" Il n'est pas de mortel qui parle comme lui."

1. 35. usage de t esprit. Voiture's great merit consists in the inexhausti'ble variety of forms which he applies to the monotonous sterility of his ideas. He never seems to move beyond the narrow circle of drawing-room topics, but thèse he présents to the reader under a countless variety of shapes.

1.39. écrit purement. "Pureté méticuleuse," says M. Vapereau {Dict. général des littératures).

1. 40. qiii aient vieilli, obsolète ; note the idiomatic use of tlie subjunctive, because the statemcnt made is only of a possible or probable character.

Page 107.

1. 5. au barreau. And nevertheless it is perfectly true to say of Patru's forensic compositions: " Ils fatiguent par leur sécheresse."

1. 12. presque toujours piquante. Critics hâve noticed the inconsistency of Jean Jacques Rousseau who calls La Rochefoucauld's Maximes " un triste livre." Without wishing to défend, the leading axiom of the work, we may just be allowed to say that in his Emile Rousseau adopts exactly the same view when he says : " Les auteurs, en nous parlant toujours de la vérité, dont ils ne se soucient guère, ne songent qu'à leur intérêt, dont ils ne parlent pas : Pintérét, voilà le grand mobile de toutes les actions.^''

1. 21. qui... se soit ressenti. See above, note to p. 106, 1. 40.

1. 23. la fixation du langage. The Provincial Letters may be considered as forming two séries. The first four or five are spécimens of the best comic humour ; there is apparent from one letter to another, a climax which reaches its height at the close of the tenth. Then Pascal, dropping the mask, turns round against the Jesuits themselves and denounces them to the world in a séries of éloquent addresses.

1. 28. ont été abolis. The Jesuits were expelled from France in 1674, and the order was suppressed by Pope Clément XIV in 1773.

1. 32. le style lâche... décousu, the slovenly...disjointed style.

Page 108.

1, T. des mœurs dti siècle, Massillon has been called " le Racine de la chaire."

1. 5. Peut-être serait-il à souhaiter, it might perhaps be wâshed.

1. 9. compasser — arranger avec exactitude, et comme aie compas. Notice that Voltaire judges sermons and homilies hère exclusively from the artistic or literary point of view, and therefore utterly misapprehends the relation between the text and the discourse, besides ignoring the fact that neither Greece nor Rome could possibly know anything about sermon composition.

1. 23. Mademoiselle Desvicux, fille dhin rare mérite. The pretended circumstance hère alluded to has been amply refuted by Burigny and de Bausset in their lives of Bossuet.

1. 26. se montrèreitt de si bonne hetire. Bossuet was only sixteen years old when he preached at the . Hôtel de Rambouillet ; the wellknown anecdote of his sermon in the salon bleu is perfectly authentic, and was told first by Tallemant des Réaux, and then by the Abbé Ledieu. As it was nearly midnight when the sermon came to an end. Voiture remarked that "il n'avait j-amais ouï prêcher ni si tôt, ni si tard."

1.32. soutenus cF une action = soutenus par une action. See above, note to p. 88, 1. 22.

1. 40. qui tient un peu à la poésie, which is somewhat of the province of poetry.

Page 109.

1. 12. Madame, Henrietta, Duchess of Orléans, sister-în-law of Louis XIV.

1. 31. dont il décrit .. .dont il peint... dont il juge ; hère do7tt=avec laquelle. This is an archaism.

1. 38. sojt rival et son ennemi, on account of the famous controversy about Madame Guyon and the Quietists.

1. 39. ce livre singiilier. Singulier hère is taken in the sensé of unlike any other.

qîd tient à la fois du... which participâtes at the same time in the nature of.

Page iio.

1. 8. enfants de France, thename given to children or grand children of the King.