- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: A German traveler wrote of the politeness of the French. He must not have met you during his travels.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: You, the wealthy, don't be harsh and haughty. Beware, judges. A deadly revolution is in the making. The nobility hasn't understood the people. The clergy has lost contact with them. Soon the people will fight social injustice. Everyone will be a citizen. Hear the voice of a plebeian who lives with the people.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: I won't discuss Mr. Casanova's literary talents, but as for his exploits in love, I have some reservations. First, he's too big. I told him: the best lovers are always of small stature. That's been proven.
- Countess Sophie de la Borde: Proven by whom?
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: The influx of blood, which gives the virile member its power is all the greater and fiercer if the area to be irrigated is smaller.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: Feast for the eyes, ecstasy for the soul! Undeniable proof of God's existence! To have loved others is like having thrust one's sword into water a hundred times. Oh, to fondle those tiny sparrow feet! Those slim doe-like ankles.
- Madame Faustine: He's a great writer. Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne.
- Prostitute with green stockings: Yes, madame, but does that mean I have to do something special?
- Madame Faustine: Just do what you always do. Intellectuals or blacksmiths, in a bed, they're all the same. But intellectuals talk more!
- Agnès, Restif's daughter: It's not enough to write, edit, and print books. You still have to sell them.
- Madame Faustine: Come on up. I could introduce someone to you.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: No, it's too late. Tonight I've got printing to do.
- Madame Faustine: Must be urgent if you don't have time to sing a lullaby to a lovely young thing whose tiny feet are encased in green satin mules with pink heels.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: I often think the most unpardonable of all my mistakes was to not accept your marriage proposal.
- Madame Faustine: You still remember? We were both so young. My business was starting to boom. I could have provided you with money and you would have always had new girls.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: I have always preferred you to your girls. You know that.
- Thomas Paine: Artists can often sense what's afoot. They understand the causes, the motives long before others do.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: My poor girl. Fate dealt you such a lousy father.
- [kisses Agnès cheek, then leans down to suck on her breast]
- Madame Adélaïde Gagnon: You've spent time at the court in France?
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: Mr. Casanova has been the toast of every court in Europe.
- Casanova: It wasn't a great privilege. Courts aren't the gardens full of rare blossoms people imagine. I mostly met wrinkled old countesses and princesses.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: I haven't introduced myself: Nicolas-Edmé Restif de la Bretonne.
- Casanova: Who wrote "Fanchette's Foot", "The Bastard Daughter", "Parisian Couples", "New Abelard", "Contemporary Women"?
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: At your service. Thank you for not mentioning, "The Perverted Peasant".
- Casanova: I've read and enjoyed that too. But it's obviously not your favorite.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: Some fathers prefer their least gifted children.
- Countess Sophie de la Borde: I saw you when I was 15.
- Casanova: Really?
- Countess Sophie de la Borde: Can you keep a secret?
- Casanova: Yes.
- Countess Sophie de la Borde: You were my first love.
- Casanova: You met me too soon - and I met you too late. So it goes.
- Virginia Capacelli: Have you read them, madame?
- Madame Adélaïde Gagnon: That man's books, me? I wouldn't dream of it!
- Countess Sophie de la Borde: I would! And with the greatest pleasure. I found them uniquely inspired on the subject of man, of woman, of love amongst our good people.
- De Wendel: In Strasbourg, he was known as a gambler, as a man who ran lotteries, designed textiles, directed plays, dabbled in the occult.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: As a seer too!
- De Wendel: But mostly for his boudoir escapades.
- Countess Sophie de la Borde: When I used to go to Paris, I even heard Madame de Pompadour was mad for him. It seems no woman could resist your compatriot.
- Virginia Capacelli: Thank you, Madame!
- [to Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne]
- Virginia Capacelli: Did you really travel with him?
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: Ah, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But, I assure you I resisted him.
- Casanova: I miss my sweet France of yesteryear, when everything was bright and harmonious, where it was a good life, even for a foreigner. Dignity was respected. Dignity is the first thing you lose. You're getting ready to have the people as your monarch: well, it's the most violent and tyrannical of all monarchs.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: Damned bladder! To get this old and have to pee constantly. And with such pain.
- Casanova: You always get punished in the places where you sinned.
- De Wendel: Your pasts are so eventful that you neglect the present. You haven't even noticed the three ladies here watching you. The looks they're giving you. Who knows, maybe I'll witness in this very coach, between two relays, the 1,000th conquest, Mr. de la Bretonne or Mr. Casanova.
- Casanova: What a pain in the ass.
- Countess Sophie de la Borde: Why not give Mr. Wendel that pleasure? True, the conditions aren't ideal, six people in a carriage, four more than necessary. But you've been in more desperate straits and come out ahead. I remember, Mr. Restif, reading some of your truly perilous adventures with a husband snoring in bed beside you.
- Virginia Capacelli: No.
- Countess Sophie de la Borde: Yes! Or in a confessional within convent walls, on a river barge, up a tree, in a stable, with a girl holding yarn for her blind mother making a skein. You can't be defeated by a stagecoach.
- Casanova: If a widow's inconsolable, she's jealous of her sorrow. If she's consolable, at least in public, she hides her availability. And if she's already been consoled, she doesn't want it known.
- Casanova: Our traveling companions are waiting.
- Countess Sophie de la Borde: With a man like you, they could think we went off for a flirtatious interlude.
- Casanova: For me, it has been one, madame.
- Casanova: Making love in a carriage, which we may have done anyway, or in the most secret alcove, is all the same. What matters is - that there should be - is that, in lovemaking, there should be - should be...
- Madame Adélaïde Gagnon: There should be - what?
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: Mystery.
- Madame Adélaïde Gagnon: He may be handsome, but what a temper.
- Virginia Capacelli: In Bologna, we call them, "ballbusters". The girl is charming too. Not bad. A bit dark maybe.
- Madame Adélaïde Gagnon: If God made them black, there must be a reason.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: A while ago, in the street, I watched the faces of those peasants. They weren't moved. They weren't children happy to have found a "long lost father." Those faces betrayed centuries of famine, of destitution, and humiliation and the fear that today may not be the end of such injustices.
- Thomas Paine: For that they'll have to wait for a future occasion.
- Countess Sophie de la Borde: I was never so afraid in my life. Afraid. Not only of that madman who attacked us, afraid of the speeches of the people, of you - afraid of what I don't know, of what I am about to lose. The court is a cozy nest.
- Casanova: I'll head for Verdun. I don't enjoy attending a king's funeral.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: The French people don't want his death.
- Casanova: My dear Restif, when a king is captured, not by another king, but by a postmaster, he's as good as dead.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: Idiocy is the worst betrayal of all.
- Thomas Paine: And no revolution can succeed without it.
- Thomas Paine: All of us are afraid. With faith and ideals, we try to protect ourselves from fear. But we must find the ideals that suit us. Yes, Countess. And when we realize our ideals have reached a dead end, we must have courage to change them.
- Thomas Paine: It must be exhausting to play king.
- Nicolas Edmé Restif de la Bretonne: The greater the task, the greater the honors.
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Top Gap
By what name was That Night in Varennes (1982) officially released in Canada in English?
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