'Politics are of course unsafe, literature they have none. They never
read. A cardinal told me something which I doubted, and I asked him where
he had found it. "In certi libri," he answered.
'Another, who has a fine old library, begged me to use it. "You will do
the room good," he said. "No one has been there for years." Even scandal
and gossip must be avoided under an Ecclesiastical Government.
'They never ride, they never shoot, they never visit their estates, they
give no parties; if it were not for the theatre and for their lawsuits
they would sink into vegetable life.'
'Sermoneta,' I said, 'told me that many of his lawsuits were hereditary,
and would probably descend to his son.'
'If Sermoneta,' said Ampere, 'with his positive intelligence and his
comparative vigour, cannot get through them, what is to be expected from
others? They have, however, one merit, one point of contact with the rest
of the world--their hatred of their Government. They seem to perceive,
not clearly, for they perceive nothing clearly, but they dimly see, that
the want of liberty is a still greater misfortune to the higher classes
than to the lower.
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