k, watching oriental houris all day long, executing those exquisite Egyptian dances, as sensuous as the dream of a chaste man, or a Beauceron peasant, or a Venetian gentleman surrounded by gentlewoman, or a petty German prince, furnishing the half of a foot-soldier to the Germanic confederation, and occupying his leisure with drying his breeches on his hedge, that is to say, his frontier. Those are the positions for which I was born!
Yes, I have said a Turk, and I will not retract.
I do not understand how people can habitually take Turks in bad part; Mohammed had his good points; respect for the inventor of seraglios with houris and paradises with odalisques!
Let us not insult Mohammedanism, the only religion which is ornamented with a hen-roost! Now, I insist on a drink. The earth is a great piece of stupidity.
And it appears that they are going to fight, all those imbeciles, and to break each other''s profiles and to massacre each other in the heart of summer, in the month of June, when they might go off with a creature on their arm, to breathe the immense heaps of new-mown hay in the meadows! Really, people do commit altogether too many follies.
An old broken lantern which I have just seen at a bric-a-brac merchant''s suggests a reflection to my mind; it is time to enlighten the human race. Yes, behold me sad again.
That''s what comes of swallowing an oyster and a revolution the wrong way!