It is, and especially with superficial people who are envious or sarcastic, a sensation which passes off with the rapidity of lightning, and never returns.

It would seem as though fame, like the sun, hot and luminous at a distance, is cold as the summit of an alp when you approach it.

Perhaps man is only really great to his peers; perhaps the defects inherent in his constitution disappear sooner to the eyes of his equals than to those of vulgar admirers.

A poet, if he would please in ordinary life, must put on the fictitious graces of those who are able to make their insignificances forgotten by charming manners and complying speeches.

The poet of the faubourg Saint-Germain, who did not choose to bow before this social dictum, was made before long to feel that an insulting provincial indifference had succeeded to the dazed fascination of the earlier evenings.