From Cousin Pons, by Honoré de Balzac
THE FREQUENT GUEST
"And he must combine his role of listener with a second part: he must applaud continually, smile on everyone, accuse nobody, defend nobody; from his point of view, everyone must be in the right. And so, in the house of his kinsmen, Pons no longer counted as a man; he was a digestive apparatus."
From Chapter One
