Théophile Gautier’s 1865 novel, La Belle-Jenny, is a boisterous, Romantic tale of conspiracy and intrigue, all of which fails. Couples are parted; lives are ruined. Near the end, Arthur Sidney, the character most to blame for all of this, sums up what he’s learned:
Aimez quelqu’un ou quelque chose, un homme, un enfant, un chien, une espèce de fleurs, mais jamais une idée, c’est trop dangereux.
Love someone or something, a man, a child, a dog, a kind of flower, but never an idea, it’s too dangerous.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Lisa // Dec 17, 2011 at 11:12 am
Timely words for the holiday season, Doug.
2 Doug // Dec 17, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Always timely. People do do funny things when they idealize the holidays.
Gautier is a lot of fun. This sentence was a surprise, coming after pages of cartoonish thrills and chills. My other favorite part is when he acknowledges a particularly preposterous coincidence by saying that nobody would believe it in a novel.