“Whatever you could desire, you’ll find it here; you’ll even find courses in physics, poetry, chemistry, anatomy, languages, natural history, etc., etc., etc.⁶⁹⁰ The women, here, have given up all the pedantic seriousness of the old Hôtel de Rambouillet, and they flirt with the sciences, which are now nothing other than a game for them, and entertain them as much as their miniature poodle and their parrot.”

“Here you can see everything, hear everything, learn about everything; there is everything necessary to turn a young man into a budding scholar: but it is here also that the realm of licentiousness acts upon a headstrong youth who, wandering then around the various environments, develops a style not known elsewhere: indecency without passion.⁶⁹¹ Here, licentiousness is eternal; its temple is open at any hour of the day and night, and at prices of every kind.”

“All the fripperies of fashions that last a day are in the same shop as the most valuable astronomic gems that last for centuries.”⁶⁹²

“The coffeehouses are packed with men who have one single occupation for the whole day: telling or listening to news, which becomes unrecognizable through the color each person gives it, according to their condition.”⁶⁹³

“… the Palais-Royal is sapping the other districts of the city, which have the air of sad and deserted provinces.”⁶⁹⁴

“… this maze of ribbons, gauze, tassels, flowers, garments, masks, boxes of rouge, packets of half-foot-long pins.”⁶⁹⁵

There is one place where Paris, in all its dispersion and fragmentation, in its aroma of pleasure and money, grows and accumulates everything within the setting of a palace, within its limpid shell. This place is the Palais-Royal, which becomes Palais-Marchand when, thanks to the debts and greed of the Duc d’Orléans, workshops, erotic caverns, perfumeries and gaming rooms are opened beneath the porticoes. On the brink of the Revolution, those arcades become the magnet of Rumors, the astrolabe of courtesans, the embers of persecutions. From those windows—through which only the shouts of playing children can now be heard, and long before Colette and Cocteau gazed out of them—two rivals had once kept watch in the darkness, attendants to the most credulous and indifferent being, the Lord of the Place, the Duc d’Orléans, later Philippe-Égalité. These were Madame de Genlis, who “to avoid the scandal of flirtation had always readily succumbed,” and Choderlos de Laclos, well-practiced in intrigue, theorist of “wicked gallantry” as “a useful prelude for the wicked politician.”^{696, 697}