“ The Devil teaches women what they are – or they would teach it to the Devil if he did not know. ”
For in Paris, whenever God puts a pretty woman there (the streets), the Devil, in reply, immediately puts a fool to keep her.
~ Jules Barbey D'aurevilly
They had...finished their lives before their death – which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.
In Paris, where raillery is so quick to throw emotion out the window, silence, in a roomful of clever people after a story, is the most flattering of all marks of success
She was one of those women of good family who no longer exist, elegant, distinguished, and haughty, whose pallor and thinness seem to say, 'I am conquered by the era, like all my breed. I am dying, but I despise you,' and - devil take me! - plebeian as I am, and though it is not very philosophical , I cannot help finding that beautiful.