n a little state there is not a great inequality of
fortune, there will be no luxury; if this inequality exists, luxury is
the remedy for it. It is her sumptuary laws that have lost Geneva her
liberty.

[16] If by luxury one understands everything that is beyond the
necessary, luxury is a natural consequence of the progress of the human
species; and to reason consequently every enemy of luxury should believe
with Rousseau that the state of happiness and virtue for man is that,
not of the savage, but of the orang-outang. One feels that it would be
absurd to regard as an evil the comforts which all men would enjoy:
also, does one not generally give the name of luxury to the
superfluities which only a small number of individuals can enjoy. In
this sense, luxury is a necessary consequence of property, without which
no society can subsist, and of a great inequality between fortunes which
is the consequence, not of the right of property, but of bad laws.
Moralists should address their sermons to the legislators, and not to
individuals, because it is in the order of possible things that a
virtuous and enlightened man may have the power to make reasonable laws,
and it is not in human nature for all the rich men of a country to
renounce through virtue procuring for themselves for money the
enjoyments of pleasure or vanity.

_GENERAL REFLECTION ON MAN_

It needs twenty years to lead man from the plant state in which he is
within his mother's womb, and the pure animal state which is the lot of
his early childhood, to the state when the maturity of the reason begins
to appear. It has needed thirty centuries to learn a little about his
structure. It would need eternity to learn something about his soul. It
takes an instant to kill him.

_MAN IN THE IRON MASK_

The author of the "Siecle de Louis XIV."[17] is the first to speak of
the man in the iron mask in an authenticated history. The reason is that
he was very well informed about the anecdote which astonishes the
present century, which will astonish posterity, and which is only too
true. He was deceived about the date of the death of this singularly
unfortunate unknown. The date of his burial at St. Paul was March 3rd,
1703, and not 1704. (Note.--According to a certificate reported by
Saint-Foix, the date was November 20th, 1703.)

He was imprisoned first of all at Pignerol before being so on St.
Margaret's Islands, and later in the Bastille; always under th