There exist but three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create. Other men are serfs or slaves, created for the stable, that is, to exercise what are called professions. XIX Observe that those who advocate the abolition of capital punishment are more or less interested in its abolishment. Often, they are executioners. The matter may be summarized thus: "I wish to be able to cut off your head, but you shall not touch mine." Those who abolish souls (materialists) necessarily abolish hell; they are, beyond all doubt, interested. At the least, they are men that are afraid to live again, slothful ones. XX Mme. de Metternich, although a princess, has forgotten to answer me, in regard to what I said of her and of Wagner. Manners of the Nineteenth Century. XXII The woman Sand is the Prudhomme of immorality. She has always been a moralist. Only formerly she practiced amorality. Also she has never been an artist. She has the famous _fluent style_, dear to the bourgeois. She is stupid, she is heavy, she is a chatterbox. She has, in moral matters, the same depth of judgment and the same delicacy of feeling as innkeepers and kept women. What she has said of her mother; what she has said of poetry. Her love for the workingman. George Sand is one of those old ingenues who do not wish to quit the boards. See the preface to _Mlle. La Quintinie_, where she claims that true Christians do not believe in hell. Sand is for the God of good folks, the god of innkeepers and of domestic sharpers. She has good reason to wish to wipe out hell. XXIII It must not be thought that the devil tempts only men of genius. He doubtless scorns imbeciles, but he does not disdain their assistance. Quite the contrary, he founds great hopes on them. Take George Sand. She is especially, and above all things, a great _blockhead_; but she is _possessed_. It is the devil who has persuaded her to trust in her _good heart_ and her _good sense_, so that she might persuade all other great blockheads to trust in their good heart and their good sense. I cannot think of that stupid creature without a shudder of horror. If I were to meet her, I could not keep myself from hurling a basin of holy water at her. XXIV I am bored in France, especially as every one resembles Voltaire. Emerson forgot Voltaire in his "Representative Men." He could have made a fine chapter entitled Voltaire or The Antipoet, the king of boobies, the prince of the shallow, the anti-artist, the preacher of innkeepers, the father who "lived in a shoe" of the editors of the century. XXV In the "Ears of the Earl of Chesterfield," Voltaire jokes at the expense of that immortal soul which resided, for nine months, in the midst of excrement and urine. Voltaire, like all the slothful, hates mystery.