‘Whatever are you dreaming of, sir?’  Mathilde asked him.  There was a note of intimacy in her question, and she had come back running and was quite out of breath in her eagerness to be with him.  Julien was tired of self-suppression.  In a moment of pride, he told her frankly what he was thinking.

(The Red and the Black, vol. 2, chapter 40, ‘Queen Marguerite’.)

With this, I think, the series comes to a close.  Roger posted up a useful survey a little while ago on reader reactions to this blog, and one was a greater emphasis on international law.  So I am going to bring this to a close, and focus more in international law in my posts.  I might move it over to my home blog, and there were a couple of lovely little epigraphs (“Russia follows French fashions in all things, but always at a distance of fifty years” or “I crave leave to slander France a little more”) that would be cute, but I think I should get more legally serious here.

… economics and Hume are the fashion.

(The Red and the Black, volume 2, chapter 53, “The Clergy, Their Forests, Liberty.”)  Special edition for … Eric Posner, Adrian Vermeule, Andrew Guzman, Jack Goldsmith, and Kal Raustiala!  (Utilitarianism has a long cultural, indeed literary, history.)

The Baron could not produce epigrams; he required at least four sentences of six lines each to be brilliant.

(The Red and the Black, part II, chapter 34, “The Hotel de La Mole.”  Sometimes, alas, I fear this is me.)

After several months of application kept up at every moment, Julien still had the air of a thinker. His way of moving his eyes and opening his lips did not reveal an implicit faith ready to believe everything and to uphold everything, even by martyrdom. It was with anger that Julien saw himself surpassed in this respect by the most boorish peasants. They had good reasons for not having the air of thinkers.

(The Red and the Black, Part One, Chapter 26, “The World, or What the Rich Lack.”  Special edition of SwS for my nephew James Knabe, finishing up his first semester as a grad student in the English department at Yale.)

Well, not really Stendhal on Thanksgiving.  Stendhal never visited the United States, but that did not inhibit him from expressing a great many opinions about the place (mostly negative observations in the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ vein), particularly in the entire chapter devoted to love in the United States in that curious book-length essay, On Love.   Stendhal was highly skeptical that so uncultured a culture as that of the United States was capable of Great Love – love of the kind in The Red and the Black or The Charterhouse of Parma.  Perhaps he was right.  The following quote below has always reminded me of Thanksgiving Day and Christmas – Jingle Bells – and so in that spirit:

In the Winter … American young people of both sexes drive about night and day over the snow in sleighs, gaily travelling distances of fifteen or twenty miles without anyone to chaperone them; and nothing untoward ever occurs.

Do we really think that ‘nothing untoward’ ever happened?  I suspect, rather, Much Untowardness, Gaiety, and Fun.  This was the culture, after all, that produced … “bundling.”  Still, a charming thought for Thanksgiving Weekend from a quintessential European snob.

‘The Marquis does not like bloggers, I warn you; it is his one antipathy,’ the Abbe Pirard said to Julien.  ’Know Latin, Greek if you can, the history of the Egyptians, of the Persians, and so forth; he will honour you and protect you as a scholar.  But do not go and post a single page in French, especially upon grave subjects that are above your position in society; he would call you a blogger and take a dislike to you.  What, living in a great nobleman’s mansion, don’t you know the Duc de Castries’s saying about d’Alembert and Rousseau: “That sort of fellow wishes to blog about everything, and has not a thousand crowns a year”?’

(The Red and the Black, part 2, chapter 34, “The Hotel de la Mole.”  ’Scribber’ in the original, but close in spirit, yes?)

Julien fell asleep, dreaming of honors for himself and human rights for everyone else.

‘Beware of that young man, who has so much energy,’ her brother cried; ‘if the Revolution begins again, he will have us all guillotined.’ …

‘Another Danton?’ thought Mathilde to herself.  Her brother’s remark filled her with horror; it greatly disturbed her; but after sleeping on it, she interpreted it as the highest possible praise…. ‘Very well! Let us suppose that the Revolution has begun.  What parts would Croisenois and my brother play?  It is all prescribed for them: sublime resignation.  They would be heroic sheep, allowing their throats to be cut without a word.  Their sole fear when dying would still be of committing a breach of taste.  My little Julien would blow out the brains of the Jacobin who came to arrest him, if he had the slightest hope of escaping.  He, at least, has no fear of bad taste.’

(The Red and the Black, Book Two, chapter 42, Another Danton?)