Word: chamfort
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...more so than the content of Holzer's thoughts. Starting with Goethe, Pascal and Chamfort, the list of aphorists to whom she is inferior would be exceedingly long, but she does try. Not for nothing does she call her utterances "truisms." Their lack of wit is almost disarming. They have an earnest hortatory confidence that makes other kinds of word art -- Ben Vautier's in France in the '60s, for instance -- look semidetached. Holzer's trouble is that although she wants to use language alone as the stuff of visual art -- a dubious enterprise anyway -- she has no language...
...Tudor ancestors the height of affectation, so, the first to follow that Italian custom doubtless did so, in large part, to impress their neighbors with their sophistication. Evolution itself is a process of rising above one's origins and one's station." The writer Sébastien Chamfort located what is surely the ultimate snob, a nameless French gentleman: "A fanatical social climber, observing that all round the Palace of Versailles it stank of urine, told his tenants and servants to come and make water round his château...
...death. He was a distinguished partisan in the only warfare the French ever enjoyed, and the only fight Americans think that they have pressed hard-the battle of the sexes. "One must make the choice between loving women and knowing them; there is no middle course," said Nicolas Chamfort, 18th century epigrammist. True for most men, but not for Maurois. He loved women, and he knew them...
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