Scaramouche

A Romance of the French Revolution

By Rafael Sabatini

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.

… he had confirmed into an unassailable conviction his earliest conscious impressions of the general insanity of his own species.

(Sabatini 1973, 1)

“You are going to abolish governing classes? An interesting experiment. I believe it was the original plan of creation, and it might have succeeded but for Cain.”

You must change man, not systems. Can you and our vaporing friends of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, or any other learned society of France, devise a system of government that has never yet been tried? Surely not. And can they say of any system tried that it proved other than a failure in the end? My dear Philippe, the future is to be read with certainty only in the past. Ab actu ad posse valet consecutio. Man never changes. He is always greedy, always acquisitive, always vile. I am speaking of Man in the bulk.

(Sabatini 1973, 4)

“Acquisitiveness is the curse of mankind. And shall you expect less acquisitiveness in men who have built themselves up by acquisitiveness?

(Sabatini 1973, 5)

“Are men and women nothing more than names? Do the souls of them count for nothing? Is there no joy in life, no happiness, that wealth and pleasure and empty, high-sounding titles are to be its only aims?

(Sabatini 1973, 13)

“Humanity, monsieur,” Philippe replied, “Is more ancient than nobility. Human rights are contemporary with man.”

(Sabatini 1973, 21)

And then his heart trembled as he considered that Philippe, a man of peace, almost a priest, and apostle of Christianity, had gone to his Maker with the sin of anger on his soul. It was horrible. Yet God would see the righteousness of that anger. And in no case – be man’s interpretation of Divinity what it might – could that one sin outweigh the loving good that Philippe had ever practised, the noble purity of his great heart. God after all, reflected Andre-Louis, was not a grand-seigneur.

(Sabatini 1973, 28)

… have never known anything but trouble to come out of learning. It unsettles a man. It complicates his views of life, destroys the simplicity which makes for peace of mind and happiness.

(Sabatini 1973, 29)

“M. de Lesdiguieres,” said he, “may I recite to you an interesting fact in natural history? The tiger is a great lord in the jungle, and was for centuries the terror of lesser beasts, including the wolf. The wolf, himself a hunter, wearied of being hunted. He took to associating with other wolves, and then the wolves, driven to form packs for self-protection, discovered the power of the pack, and took to hunting the tiger, with disastrous results to him. You should study Buffon, M. de Lesdiguleres.”

(Sabatini 1973, 38)

For in the voice with which he spoke each now recognized the voice of himself, giving at last expression to the thoughts that for months and years had been inarticulately stirring in each simple mind.

(Sabatini 1973, 46)

He had wrought them up to a pitch of dangerous passion, and they were ripe for any violence to which he urged them. If he had failed with the windmill, at least he was now master of the wind.

(Sabatini 1973, 47)

But if I am not brave, at least I am prudent; so that where I lack one virtue I may lay claim to possessing another almost to excess.

“It is better,” he says, “to die of hunger having lived without grief and fear, than to live with a troubled spirit amid abundance.”

(Sabatini 1973, 175)

… there is no worse hell than that provided by the regrets for wasted opportunities.

(Sabatini 1973, 177)

“What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess – unless he is a coward.”

(Sabatini 1973, 205)

“Man, madame, is the child of his own work. Let there be no inheriting of rights but from such a parent. Thus a nation’s best will always predominate, and such a nation will achieve greatly.”

(Sabatini 1973, 218)

“When we know all of whatever it may be, we can never do anything but forgive, madame. That is the profoundest religious truth that was ever written. It contains, in fact, a whole religion – the noblest religion any man could have to guide him. I say this for your comfort, madame my mother.”

(Sabatini 1973, 295)

Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose. In life we pay for the evil that in life we do.

(Sabatini 1973, 304)

“I thought you were a republican,” said she.

“Why, so I am. I am talking like one. I desire a society which selects its rulers from the best elements of every class and denies the right of any class or corporation to usurp the government to itself – whether it be the nobles, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. For government by any one class is fatal to the welfare of the whole.

(Sabatini 1973, 308)

Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it.