The great man’s room is still in the state he left it when he went to Paris, hangings of embroidered blue taffeta, portraits of the King of Prussia, Mme du Chatelet, Lekain. Today they sell Englishmen the pen Voltaire used.

Some men like to ponder over the moral conclusions they have drawn from a fact, but they are so unlucky as to be unable to remember any figures or proper names. Men like this are apt to be brought up short in the midst of a lively discussion by some idiot who knows a date.

I give up. No matter what style I employ, what striking turn of phrase I may invent, I shall never be able to give any idea of the triviality of provincial conversations, of the numberless petty things that make up the life of even the most elegant provincial gentleman. You refuse to believe that reasonable beings could interin such things, but then, one day, you perceive the abysmal boredom of the provinces, and you understand it all immediately.

Caligula began or re-established the games celebrated around this altar of Augustus, and if Suetonius and Juvenal can be believed, it was here he placed the seal on his folly. Prizes for eloquence were distributed here, but the losers were obliged to furnish the prizes and present them to the winners. Then they had to recite harangues in praise of the winner. (What torture for these jealous men of letters!) But that was not all the danger they ran, either. If their works seemed unworthy of the gathering to which they had dared present them, the unlucky authors had to efface their productions with their tongues or at least with a sponge. Then they were beaten and thrown into the Rhone.

“Your provincial, if his countryside has some reputation for beauty, brags about it in terms that are equally exaggerated and devoid of ideas—in fact, poor copies of Chateaubriand’s pomposity. Or, on the other hand, if the newspapers have not warned him that he has a fascinating landscape a hundred yards from his country house, he will tell you when you ask if there is anything worth seeing in his neighborhood, “Ah, Monsieur, how easy it would be to cut an income of a hundred thousand francs out of woods full of timber like that!””

“The tone of these half yokels-half bourgeois whose conversation I overhear along the road is cold and reasonable. It has that touch of joking malice that shows they have never had any great sorrows or deep feelings. This scoffing tone does not exist in Italy at all. Instead, there is the fierce silence of passion, a language full of images, and the jokes are bitter.”

When a minister gives a cross to a fool who is notoriously inept, in Paris we smile. There would be nothing to laugh at if the cross had been given to someone who deserved it. In the provinces they grow angry at such a spectacle. They become profoundly disaffected. The provincial still does not know that everything in life is a comedy.