Human masquerades

I will speak of the singular necessity that the best Spirits have of always meddling in the things that are most foreign to them. For example: an excellent merchant will not doubt for an instant his political aptitude, and the greatest diplomat will put his self-love into the decision of the most frivolous things. This defect, common to all men and women, has no other motive than vanity, and this alone has artificial needs. For dress, for the spirit, for the heart itself, it seeks, above all, what is false; it vitiates the instinct of the beautiful and the true; it leads women to denature their beauty; it persuades men to seek precisely what is most prejudicial to them. If the French did not have this defect, the men would be the most intelligent in the world and the women the most seductive Eves known. Let us not have, then, this absurd weakness; let us have the courage to be ourselves, to wear the color of our Spirit, as that of our hair. But thrones will crumble, republics will be established, before a frivolous Frenchman renounces his pretensions to gravity, and a Frenchwoman her pretensions to firmness. Continual masquerade, in which each one wears the garb of another epoch, or simply that of one's neighbor. Political masquerade, religious masquerade in which, carried away by the vertigo, you all seek yourselves madly, finding in that tumult neither your point of departure nor your goal. Delphine de Girardin. n [1]

[see Delphine de Girardin.]