Mike, it may be the way you talk in SA but what you say about the "Coloureds" sounds extremely condescending and racist.
It sounds like you are surprised that they are capable of respecting anyone or anything!!Perhaps not how you meant to portray it but to a Kiwi, well it made me squirm mate!!WELL, PRINCE, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war, if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that Antichrist I real- ly believe he is Antichrist I will have nothing more to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened you sit down and tell me all the news." It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pdvlovna Sch^rer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Marya Fe- dorovna. With these words she greeted Prince Vasili Kurdgin, a man of high rank and impor- tance, who was the first to arrive at her recep- tion. Anna Pdvlovna had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by the elite. All her invitations without exception, writ- ten in French, and delivered by a scarlet-liver- ied footman that morning, ran as follows: "If you have nothing better to do, Count [or Prince], and if the prospect of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible, I shall be very charmed to see you tonight be- tween 7 and 10 Annette Sch^rer." "Heavens! what a virulent attack!" replied the prince, not in the least disconcerted by this reception. He had just entered, wearing an em- broidered court uniform, knee breeches, and shoes, and had stars on his breast and a serene expression on his flat face. He spoke in that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought, and with the gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a man of importance who had grown old in society and at court. He went up to Anna Pavlovna, kissed her hand, presenting to her his bald, scented, and shining head, and complacently seated himself on the sofa. "First of all, dear friend, tell me how you are. Set your friend's mind at rest," said he without altering his tone, beneath the polite- ness and affected sympathy of which indiffer- ence and even irony could be discerned. "Can one be well while suffering morally? Can one be calm in tirrfes like these if one has any feeling?" said Anna Pdvlovna. "You are staying the whole evening, I hope?" "And the fete at the English ambassador's? Today is Wednesday. I must put in an appear- ance there," said the prince. "My daughter is coming for me to take me there." "I thought today's fete had been canceled. I confess all these festivities and fireworks are becoming wearisome." "If they had known that you wished it, the entertainment would have been put off," said the prince, who, like a wound-up clock, by force of habit said things he did not even wish to be believed. "Don't tease! Well, and what has been de- cided about Novosiltsev's dispatch? You know everything." "What can one say about it?" replied the prince in a cold, listless tone. "What has been decided? They have decided that Buonaparte has burnt his boats, and I believe that we are ready to burn ours." Prince Vastti always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a stale part. Anna Pdvlovna Scherer on the contrary, despite her forty years, overflowed with animation and impulsiveness. To be an enthusiast had become her social vo- cation and, sometimes even when she did not feel like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the expectations of those who knew her. The subdued smile which, though it did not suit her faded features, al- ways played round her lips expressed, as in a spoiled child, a continual consciousness of her charming defect, which she neither wished, nor could, nor considered it necessary, to correct.
"ly believe" - did you see that in what I quoted - fool.It must be terrible to be always a hate-filled nincumpoop - a liar a low-life and a ignorant useless fart - who pretends he knows something about rugby as well - where he has been proved to be an utter fool as well.
After a protesting letter from an admirer of Constance Garnett's translations, the correspondence continued, with Maude asserting that "Tolstoy authorized my wife's translation" of Resurrection and Shaw insisting on the need for a complete collected works, going beyond the "great novels" which were "sure to get themselves translated everywhere," since other translators had "picked the plums out of the pudding." He went on to compare Maude's "devoted relation" to Tolstoy with that of Henrik Ibsen's translator William Archer, or Richard Wagner's Ashton Ellis."
Look skunk - I never lied about myself - I did not get to be a low-borne uncivilized skunk like you pretending you are the greatest thing in life. You may have made money in your life - but that does not make you a human being - you still are a skunk and an insult to humanity.
