United States or Barbados ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the very last years of his life, the wonderful girouette of his imagination felt other popular gales, and produced partly as novels of actual society, partly as Janus-faced satires of what was and what might be The Coming Race, Kenelm Chillingly, and the posthumous Parisians.
How can the Parisians complain that they found her Royal Highness, on her return to France, by no means what they required in a Princess? Can it be wondered at that her marked grief should be visible when amidst the murderers of her family?
They reached the appointed spot before the others. It was a little inn in the heart of the forest. It was a pleasure-resort, more or less unclean, to which Parisians used to resort to cleanse their honor when the dirt on it became too apparent. The hedges were bright with the pure flowers of the eglantine. In the shade of the bronze-leaved oak-trees there were rows of little tables.
There were no gay groups of bannered processions; the typical incense and the public devotion of which it is the symbol were alike wanting; the streets in some places seemed deserted, and in others there was an ominous crowd, and the dreary silence was now and then broken by a distant sound of yells and cries, that struck terror into the hearts of the Parisians.
Have you ever written anything?... And you pretend to teach me how to write me, to whom writing is life!... And you can find nothing better to offer me, when you have read my music, than a hashing up of great musicians, a filthy scrabbling over their works to turn them into parlor tricks for little girls!... You go to your Parisians who are rotten enough to be taught their work by you!
The most solemn and most iniquitous of these punishments was that which befell the advocate-general, John Desmarets. "For nearly a whole year," says the monk of St. Denis, "he had served as mediator between the king and the Parisians; he had often restrained the fury and stopped the excesses of the populace, by preventing them from giving rein to their cruelty.
Sunday, the day that seems so long to worldly people, to the Parisians of the boulevard, whose fixed habits it deranges, and so melancholy to exiles without a family, is the day which constitutes to a multitude of people the only recompense, the only goal of six days of toil.
The glitter of gold, the waving plumes, and richly-caparisoned horses of the Imperial procession; the mule which preceded the Pope's cortege, and occasioned so much merriment. to the Parisians, have already been described over and over again. I may, however, relate an anecdote connected with the Coronation, told me by Josephine, and which is exceedingly characteristic of Napoleon.
Intelligent travellers and, as a rule, it is the intelligent class that feels the need of the educative influence of travel look at our beautiful monuments, wander through the streets and squares among the crowds that fill them, and, observing them, I ask myself again: Do not such people desire to study at closer range these persons who elbow them as they pass; do they not wish to enter the houses of which they see but the facades; do they not wish to know how Parisians live and speak and act by their firesides?
These were the very Parisians, who, but three years before, had been feeding on rats and dogs and dead men's bones, and the bodies of their own children, rather than open their gates to this same Prince of Bearne.
Word Of The Day