Some Maxims and Missiles of Rivarol

A few “maxims and missiles,” or “pensées et paradoxes,” by the Comte de Rivarol, translated from Rivarol: avec une notice et une portrait (Paris: Mercure de France, 1906), pp. 351–9. For something similar, see “Selections from Vauvenargues” (this blog, 17 September 2020) and “Steps upon the Sand,” Azure Bell (20 October 2020).

Men are not as wicked as you say. Twenty years it took you to write a bad book; and but a moment it took them to forget it.

“You spoke a lot with some rather annoying men.” “I spoke for fear of listening.”

A woman said to a very vain parvenu who had refused her a favour: “Fie! fie! you have all the faults of the great and good.” And she obtained all that she had asked.

Mirabeau was the man of affairs who most resembled his reputation: he was frightful.

Mirabeau is capable of anything for money, even of a good deed.

On Mirabeau. Money cost him only crimes; and those crimes cost him nothing.

I left England for two reasons: first, the climate did not suit me; then, I needed to be on the continent for my Dictionnaire de la langue. What is more, I do not care for a country in which there are more apothecaries than bakeries, and in which one can find no ripe fruit besides cooked apples. Englishwomen are lovely; but they have two left arms. “Et la grâce plus belle encore que la beauté” (“And grace more lovely still than beauty”), said our Lafontaine, who said so many things; Frenchwomen must find this verse charming.

Heaven preserve you from the love of an Englishwoman!

My work upon the Dictionnaire de la langue française put me in mind of a doctor-paramour obliged to dissect his mistress.

The happiness of children is the scandal of Providence: for if there were any good in this world, those who know the least should be most to be pitied.

One is eminently unfortunate when one’s tastes are opposed to one’s needs. I, for example, have the taste for repose and the need for activity.

“Are you bored, Milord?” “What matter that I am bored, so long as I am amused?”

Enclosed in my idleness, I see my wicked reputation accumulate about me, costing me no crime beyond a few gaieties; and I say to myself: “Nero and Caligula committed many crimes that they might be feared and hated, while for a few pleasantries they passed for monsters.”

Of twenty who speak of me, nineteen speak ill; and the twentieth, who speaks well, speaks poorly.

Between antagonists, who speak wantonly of evils of which they cannot be sure, and friends who keep prudently silent upon what good they know—what to do?

Nature having nothing new to offer me, and society still less, I wish for nothing but air and water, silence and solitude: my life’s four elements: four tasteless, blameless things.

My epitaph: “La paresse nous l’avait ravi avant la mort” (“Idleness took him from us: then death”).