Explore "Three French Moralists and the Gallantry of France" by Edmund Gosse on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If we had been in Paris on a summer's day in 1744 we might have seen emerge from a modest house in the ungenteel rue du Paon (Peacock Street) a young man of less than twenty-nine years of age. It is improbable that we should have been attracted to him without warning, for though his expression was very pleasant, he was not distinguished-looking, and though he was uncomplaining, his evident air of suffering was painful to witness. He had the gallant bearing of a soldier and a certain noble elegance, but a shade across his forehead testified to the failure of his eyesight, and he shambled along with difficulty on two lame legs. If we followed him he would probably take us slowly to the Garden of the Luxembourg, where it was very unlikely that any one would greet him.
He would presently turn out of the fashionable promenade, to contemplate the poor and the unfortunate. Sometimes he would stop those who seemed most wretched, and would try to share their sorrows, but sympathy on the part of a gentleman was strange, or else there was something in himself which failed to express his tenderness, for he complained that the unfortunate always turned away from him. If, at the moment of such a repulse, we had addressed him, and had respectfully offered him our sympathy, he would have struggled with his painful shyness, and would have told us that he felt no resentment against those who rejected his help. Nothing hardened his heart, and the lack of response merely doubled his pity. He would assure us, with the pale smile which was the charm of his anaemic countenance, that those who were vicious were so by their misfortune, not their fault, and that of the worst criminals he was persuaded that, if they could, they would "end their days in innocence."