Bossuet. Do you hate the world, mademoiselle?
Fontanges. A good deal of it: all Picardy, for example, and all Sologne; nothing is uglier—and, oh my life! what frightful men and women!
Bossuet. I would say, in plain language, do you hate the flesh and the devil?
Fontanges. Who does not hate the devil? If you will hold my hand the while, I will tell him so. I hate you, beast! There now. As for flesh, I never could bear a fat man. Such people can neither dance nor hunt, nor do anything that I know of.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, October 28, 2007
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil
Walter Savage Landor, Bossuet and the Duchess of Fontanges, from Imaginary Conversations: