(Castigat ridendo mores)

I detest hypocrisy, and nothing infuriates me like the placarding of proverbs with moral pretensions, particularly on a theatre curtain. The Opéra-Comique’s Latin motto claims that it refines our behaviour: “castigat” can have no other meaning. Isn’t that a stupid piece of lapidary hypocrisy? And even if it were true, who looks to theatres to perform this refining function? Imbeciles! Refine your repertoire, refine your singers’ voices, refine the style of your authors and composers, refine the taste of your public, refine the occupants of your boxes by admitting only pretty young women, and then your mission would be fulfilled—that’s all we ask. Anyway, just how wise is the wisdom of proverbs?

Embrace much, grasp little

This means one should occupy oneself with only a single task or enterprise— one should never have more than one vessel on the slipway or more than one iron in the fire or more than one regiment on the move. Caesar, who used to dictate three letters at a time in three different languages, was a fool; Napoleon, who found time to administer the Théâtre-Français while in Moscow, a dilettante. And husbands saddled with plump wives shouldn’t hug them, for in so doing they are indeed embracing much but grasping little.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

Following this proverb would discredit and destroy all commerce, no more and no less. It would destroy agriculture too, for if the farmer took heed of it he would hold on to his grain instead of using it to sow his fields, and we’d die of hunger.

Boredom brings its own remedy

A false neo-proverb. Every day I attend operas, cantatas, soirées and sonatas of excruciating boredom, and far from the boredom bringing its own remedy, when I leave at the end of the ordeal I feel I could happily strangle people I’d have greeted politely when I went in.

Only a dog will betray you

The naïveté of this is beneath criticism: everyone betrays you.

One must howl with the pack

A host of present-day singers have recognised the aptness of this aphorism; they find fault only with the way it is expressed, which they see as too long by half.