"You regard this as law-makers and not as statesmen. It is not a
civil contract nor a judicial contract. The analysis (of the jurist)
leads to vicious results. Man is governed by imagination only;
without imagination he is a brute. It is not for five cents a day,
simply to distinguish himself, that a man consents to be killed; if
you want to electrify him touch his heart. A notary, who is paid a
fee of twelve francs for his services, cannot do that. It requires
some other process, a legislative act. Adoption, what is that? An
imitation by which society tries to counterfeit nature. It is a new
kind of sacrament. . . . Society ordains that the bones and blood
of one being shall be changed into the bones and blood of another. It
is the greatest of all legal acts. It gives the sentiments of a son
to one who never had them, and reciprocally those of a parent. Where
ought this to originate? From on high, like a clap of thunder !"

All his expressions are bright flashes one after another.[64] Nobody,
since Voltaire and Galiani, has launched forth such a profusion of
them; on society, laws, government, France and the French, some
penetrate and explain, like those of Montesquieu, as if with a flash
of lightening. He does not hammer them out laboriously, but they
burst forth, the outpourings of his intellect, its natural,
involuntary, constant action. And what adds to their value is that,
outside of councils and private conversations, he abstains from them,
employing them only in the service of thought; at other times he
subordinates them to the end he has in view, which is always their
practical effect. Ordinarily, he writes and speaks in a different
language, in a language suited to his audience; he dispenses with the
oddities, the irregular improvisations and imagination, the outbursts
of genius and inspiration. He retains and uses merely those which are
intended to impress the personage whom he wishes to dazzle with a