United States or Anguilla ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the centre of the place was a carrousel from which came the blare of a steam orchestrion playing the "Marseillaise," one of their popular songs. From where I sat I could perceive the circle of gaudily painted beasts that revolved about this musical atrocity. I shuddered as I thought of the evil possibilities that might be suggested to my two companions by this affair.
Home by a laneway in the dim, still evening a girl was going, singing the Marseillaise. In France where the downs in the north roll away without hedges, as though they were great free giants that man had never confined, as though they were stretching their vast free limbs in the evening, the same light was smiling and glimmering softly away.
The French national music has mostly grown out of civil dissensions and party conflicts. What scenes do the "Carillon," the atrocious "Carmagnole" and the "Marseillaise" bring up!
The people were thunderstruck; they did not stir, but stared wildly and pale with horror at the regiments that now approached to the jubilant music of their bands, and treated the Viennese to the notes of the Marseillaise and the air of Va-t-en-guerrier; they stared at the sullen, ragged men who marched in the midst of the soldiers, like the Roman slaves before the car of the Triumphator.
Cousin Egbert himself mounted a horse he had called a "blue roan," waved his hand to the proprietor, who switched a lever, the "Marseillaise" blared forth, and the platform began to revolve.
At the corner of the Boulevard and the Rue des Capucines, Flocon and Louis Blanc met. "Guizot has fallen!" cried the first. "And the most intimate friend of the King has succeeded him! What have we to hope for from the change?" "What are we to do?" asked Flocon. "In one hour the people will sing the Marseillaise before the Hôtel des Affaires Étrangères!"
"Send us," wrote another general, "ten thousand men and one copy of La Marseillaise, and I will answer for victory." A hundred years and more have passed since then, but the tune has not gone stale.
The transitory expression in his eyes Eleanor saw it now with triumph was that of one who has thrown a pearl away. But he followed. Dining with Mark Heath in the Hotel Marseillaise that night, Bertram fell into a spell of musing, a visible melancholy uncommon in him; for his ill-humors, like his laughters, burned short and violent.
In the space of about half-an-hour, he handed the manuscript of the "Marseillaise" to an opera-singer whom he adored, she took it away and sang it at the Opera, it caught the popular ear from that one performance, and the dying Rouget heard it sung by the passing multitude in the streets within about fifteen minutes of the moment when it first left his hands.
So intent were they upon contributing to the comfort of the men who had been wounded in protecting their homes, as they regarded it, that they brought a piano into my ward, and the young ladies vied with each other in delectating us with the Marseillaise, Dixie, and like patriotic songs, interspersing occasionally something about moonlight walks in Southern bowers, &c, which my modesty would not allow me to suppose had any reference to the tall young surgeon.
Word Of The Day