“Your life story is a novel; and people, though they love novels wound between two yellow paper covers, are oddly suspicious of those which come to them in living vellum.”

“Come here, Grimaud," said Athos. To punish you for having spoken without leave my friend, you must eat this piece of paper: then, to reward you for the service which you will have rendered us, you shall afterwards drink this glass of wine. Here is the letter first: chew it hard." Grimaud smiled, and with his eyes fixed on the glass which Athos filled to the very brim, chewed away at the paper, and finally swallowed it. "Bravo, Master Grimaud!" said Athos. "and now take this. Good! I will dispense with your saying thank you." Grimaud silently swallowed the glass of Bordeaux; but during the whole time that this pleasant operation lasted, his eyes, which were fixed upon the heavens, spoke a language which, though mute, was not therefore the least expressive.”

“In which it is proved that, notwithstanding their names' ending in OS and IS, the heroes of the story which we are about to have the honor to relate to our readers have nothing mythological about them.”

“The same thing is happening to me as happens to people in dreams when they see and feel a wound but can't remember having received it.”

“Here is Christianity with its marvellous parable of the Prodigal Son to teach us indulgence and pardon. Jesus was full of love for souls wounded by the passions of men; he loved to bind up their wounds and to find in those very wounds the balm which should heal them. Thus he said to the Magdalen: "Much shall be forgiven thee because thou hast loved much," a sublimity of pardon which can only have called forth a sublime faith.Why do we make ourselves more strict than Christ? Why, holding obstinately to the opinions of the world, which hardens itself in order that it may be thought strong, do we reject, as it rejects, souls bleeding at wounds by which, like a sick man's bad blood, the evil of their past may be healed, if only a friendly hand is stretched out to lave them and set them in the convalescence of the heart?”

“For there are two distinct sorts of ideas: Those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.”

“...for there are two distinct sorts of ideas, those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.”