The English are, I think the most obtuse and barbarous people in the world
I no longer find such pleasure in that preeminently good society, of which I was once so fond. It seems to me that beneath a cloak of clever talk it proscribes all energy, all originality. If you are not a copy, people accuse you of being ill-mannered.
War was then no longer this noble and unified outburst of souls in love with glory that he had imagined from Napoleon's proclamations.
Because one has little fear of shocking vanity in Italy, people adopt an intimate tone very quickly and discuss personal things.
People who have been made to suffer by certain things cannot be reminded of them without a horror which paralyses every other pleasure, even that to be found in reading a story.