In the world people display their feelings, even the most avowable, with great reserve; this prudence, which paralyzes the very springs of sensitive life, seems as if it needs must neutralize the role which I attribute to the shoulder; and yet, in spite of contrary appearances, I deny that the thermometric action of the shoulder undergoes the least alteration in the aristocratic world; I deny explicitly that this agent proves less expressive and, above all, less truthful there than in the street; and that for the following reasons: 

In the first place, we cannot reasonably suppose very ardent passions in men who are enervated by the perpetual influence of an artificial society.  Now, here the stationary condition of the thermometer is explained:  it proves absolutely nothing against the truth of the reports; it remains at zero to mark a colorless medium totally destitute of vitality.  The shoulder would violate its law if it were to rise under such circumstances.  It is, therefore, perfectly in character here; it should be, a priori, impassive in a negative society.

But is the shoulder really impassive in that medium which we call society?

Yes, in the eyes of people who are not of it, and who, from that very fact, cannot understand the value of certain expressions which are almost imperceptible; no, to those who constitute that special world of relations called superior.

How many things, in fact, the shoulder reveals by those slight changes unseen by ignorant persons, and expressing particularly the delicate and exquisite charm of spiritual relations!  It is the law of infinitesimal quantities, of those scarcely perceptible movements or sensations that characterize the finer relations of people of culture, of eloquence, of grace, and of refined tastes.

It should be borne in mind, as I have already shown, that the manifestations of the shoulder in the street by no means accord with those of people ruled by the fashions of society.  There is very little harmony or relation between the exquisite joints of a refined nature, the swift and flexible movements of an elegant organism, and the evolutions clumsily executed by torpid limbs, ankylosed, as it were, by labor at once hard and constant

This observation logically led me to an important conclusion, namely, that the value or importance of a standard is deduced expressly from the nature of the being, or the object to which it is applied.  Of what value, for instance, could a millimeter be when added to the stature of a man?  That same millimeter, however, would acquire a colossal value when added to the proportions of a flea.  It would form a striking monstrosity.