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Madame de Montespan was cross, capricious, ill-tempered, and of a haughtiness in everything which, readied to the clouds, and from the effects of which nobody, not even the King, was exempt. The courtiers avoided passing under her windows, above all when the King was with her. They used to say it was equivalent to being put to the sword, and this phrase became proverbial at the Court.
But the capricious old lady only laughed, and several times, to the great offence of the wardrobe-maid, forced her to repeat 'how he bent your head down with his heavy hand, and next day she sent Gerasim a rouble. She looked on him with favour as a strong and faithful watchman.
It was the fashion, and no courtier resented this treatment, which served both to reduce the men to the rank of puppets and to render incredibly capricious the beauties who found themselves so powerful. All the virility of Calvert's nature, all his new-world independence and his sense of honor, was revolted by such a state of things.
"It looks as though one might as well do so," he said. "But you've no idea how capricious a ship is. I've not moved the wheel for the last ten minutes, and look how straight our wake is. Yet, if I were to lash this wheel exactly as it is now, it would not be half a minute before the ship would be shooting up into the wind." "How very curious!" remarked Sibylla.
And as a consequence of this his relations to them were not inward and spiritual, but external and mechanical. In the midst of a crowd of deities, capricious and conflicting in their wills, he had to find his way as best he could. There was no knowing precisely what a god might want; there was no knowing what he might be going to do.
He was a poet, historian, philologist, astronomer, chemist, doctor, theologian, antiquary, jurisconsult, designer, engraver a restless, unsettled, capricious man, whose life was nothing but an investigation, a transformation, a perpetual battle with his vast genius.
The wide old streets, with ancient houses still standing here and there, rising or falling in gentle slopes, and called by quaint old names such as he never heard elsewhere; the fine old churches crowning the hills, and lifting up delicate tall spires, visible a score of miles away; the grammar school where he had spent the happiest days of his boyhood; the rapid river, brown and swirling, which swept past the town, and came back again as if it could not leave it; the ancient bridges spanning it, and the sharp-cornered recesses on them where he had spent many an idle hour, watching the boats row in and out under the arches; he saw every familiar nook and corner of his native town vividly and suddenly, as if he caught glimpses of them by the capricious play of lightning.
I said: 'As God has stopped the mouths of the lions that they could not devour Daniel, so he will preserve us from their fury." The chiefs and elders were of a different mind from their fierce and capricious young men.
A friend has left me, the sun is unkind and capricious. Everything passes away, everything forsakes us. And in place of all we have lost, age and gray hairs! ... After dinner I walked to Chailly between two showers. A rainy landscape has a great charm for me; the dark tints become more velvety, the softer tones more ethereal.
Only the palette was absent. Instead was an arm in a sling. There was another difference. Beyond, in lieu of capricious manolas, was a piano and, above it, a portrait with which Zuloaga had nothing to do. The portrait represented a man who looked very fierce and who displayed a costume rich and unusual. Beneath the portrait was a violin. Beside the piano was a sword-cane.
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