In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything.

Many French people were difficult conversationalists. Asking them not only where they were originally from but what they did in life was considered rude — I suppose because many of them did nothing (many Parisians are rentiers, people who live off the rents of their properties) or because they weren’t proud of their jobs, which simultaneously supported and interfered with their intellectual and artistic passions.

What annoys me most is that these stupid Frenchmen think I am still just seven years old - because that was my age when they first saw me - (...) they treat me here like a beginner - except the musicians; they know better.

Poor France, poor France! News of the dreadful massacre at Paris just reaches us, and the letters and newspapers not arriving to-day, everybody fears a continuation of the crisis. How is it to end? Who ‘despairs of the republic?’ Why, I do! I fear, I fear, that it cannot stand in France, and you seem to have not much more hope.

For on Cardinal Rohan saying to me that the Italians did not understand war, I replied that the French did not understand politics.

It's embarrassingly plain how inadequate language is.

Like a Frenchman, far from home, catching a whiff of Gauloise.

The English newspapers have made me so angry, that I scarcely know whether I am as much ashamed, yet the shame is very great. As if the people of France had not a right to vote as they pleased! We understand nothing in England.

Teach French and unteach sincerity.

I doubt, dearest child, that you could ever marry a Frenchman. They’re not dependable. I’ve never believed that they’re serious Catholics.” He

[T]o really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

On top of pique, umbrage, and ennui. Oh, the French diseases of the soul.

If they had had a different neighbour, one less self-absorbed and more concerned for others, a man of normal, charitable instincts, their desperate state would not have gone unnoticed, their distress-signals would have been heard, and perhaps they would have been rescued by now. Certainly they appeared utterly depraved, corrupt, vile and odious; but it is rare for those who have sunk so low not to be degraded in the process, and there comes a point, moreover, where the unfortunate and the infamous are grouped together, merged in a single fateful word. They are les miserables - the outcasts, the underdogs. And who is to blame? Is it not the most fallen who have most need of charity?