Many a one dies through taking to bed, that could have kept his life if he had kept his feet like a man.

If I had cut myself in two I would not go to bed,--till I go to the bed with a spade in it.

No! sit up like Julius Caesar; and die as you lived, in your clothes: don't strip yourself: let the old women strip you; that is their delight laying out a chap; that is the time they brighten up, the old sorceresses." He concluded this amiable rhapsody, the latter part of which was levelled at a lugubrious weakness of his grandmother's for the superfluous embellishment of the dead, by telling her it was bad enough to be tied by the foot like an ass, without settling down on his back like a cast sheep.

"Give me the armchair.

I'll sit in it, and, if I have any friends, they will show it now: they will come and tell me what is going on in the village, for I can't get out to see it and hear it, they must know that." Seated in state in his granny's easy-chair, the loss of which after thirty years' use made her miserable, she couldn't tell why, le Sieur Dard awaited his friends.
They did not come.
The rain did, and poured all the afternoon.