Youth, by Leo Tolstoy
Several times in the course of this narrative I have hinted at an idea corresponding to the above French heading, and now feel it incumbent upon me to devote a whole chapter to that idea, which was one of the most ruinous, lying notions which ever became engrafted upon my life by my upbringing and social milieu. The human race may be divided into several categories—rich and poor, good and bad, military and civilian, clever and stupid, and so forth, and so forth. Yet each man has his own favorite, fundamental system of division which he unconsciously uses to class each new person with whom he meets. At the time of which I am speaking, my own favorite, fundamental system of division in this respect was into people “comme il faut” and people “comme il ne faut pas”—the latter subdivided, again, into people merely not “comme il faut” and the lower orders. People “comme il faut” I respected, and looked upon as worthy to...