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352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1721
I saw contractual honour dismissed, the most sacred conventions annihilated, every law of the family overthrown. I saw debtors full of avarice, proud and insolent in their poverty, worthless instruments of the ferocity of the law and the harshness of the time, pretending to pay their debts, not doing so, but stabbing their benefactors instead.At the same time that Usbek is observing France, we are observing his seraglio back in Persia falling to pieces, as his prolonged absence from his wives results in the disorder of his married life.
More shamefully still, I saw others buying notes for almost nothing, or rather picking up oak-leaves from the ground and putting them in the place of the subsistence of widows and orphans.
I saw an insatiable lust for money suddenly springing up in every heart. I saw the instantaneous development of a hateful conspiracy to get rich, not by honourable work and unstinting behaviour, but by ruining the king, the state and other citizens.
‘They have their little courteous ways which in France would seem inappropriate; for example, a captain never flogs his soldier without asking his permission, and the Inquisition never condemns a Jew to be burnt at the stake without apologizing to him. ‘Spaniards who are not burnt at the stake seem to be so fond of the Inquisition, that it would seem peevish to deprive them of it; I only wish that another Inquisition could be established, not against heretics, but against heresiarchs, who attribute the same efficacy to trivial monastic practices as they do to the seven sacraments, who worship everything they venerate, and are so pious that they are barely Christians.(*That one good book, full of all of the humours of humankind is, of course, Cervantes' Don Quixote!)
‘You can find wit and common sense among Spaniards, but do not seek these in their books; take a look at a Spaniard’s library: one half novels, and the other half works of scholasticism; you’d say that the parts had been chosen and the whole thing put together by some secret enemy of human reason.
‘The only one of their books* that is good, is the one that makes fun of all the others.(107)