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Paint us an angel, if you can, with a floating violet robe, and a face paled by the celestial light; paint us yet oftener a Madonna, turning her mild face upward and opening her arms to welcome the divine glory; but do not impose on us any aesthetic rules which shall banish from the region of Art those old women scraping carrots with their work-worn hands, those heavy clowns taking holiday in a dingy pot-house, those rounded backs and stupid weather-beaten faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions.
Here a rumour-monger was telling his tale to a gaping cluster of pallid faces; there a plebeian pot-house orator was arraigning the upper classes to a circle of lowering brows and clenched fists, while the sneering face of some passing patrician told of a disdain beyond words, as he gathered his toga closer to avoid the contamination of the rabble.
Arrived at the Barrière Blanche, on the road to Calais, passports were examined by two or three soldiers of the National Guard, and the gates were on the point of being opened to let the two heavily-loaded carriages pass, when suddenly, from out of a neighbouring pot-house, rushed some twenty-five or thirty ruffians, ragged, drunken, and furious.
The price of the waltzing horse having hardly sufficed to pay off the debt to the publisher of La Guepe, I am not in funds this evening; but I have credit at Pere Lebuffle's, and I invite you all to dinner at his pot-house; after which we will go to my rooms, where I expect a few friends, and there you will read us your verses, Violette; we will all read some of them, and have a fine orgy of rich rhymes."
All his foreign expeditions were baffled and set at naught by the all-pervading Yankees; all his home measures were canvassed and condemned by "numerous and respectable meetings" of pot-house politicians. In the multitude of counsellors, we are told, there is safety; but the multitude of counsellors was a continual source of perplexity to William Kieft.
Seated in an ancient leathern-bottomed chair, my hostess, and the dust and darkness of the place were overlooked or forgotten. The spirit of the mighty dead seemed to hover around, as a sort of genius loci, rescuing the wretched tenement from otherwise deserved oblivion, and making its very dinginess venerable! A low resort, something between a French café, and an English pot-house.
As he went along he heard all the dogs howling. Well, henceforth they would have to follow the dead to their graves. After that Hanák had not the heart to go home, but sought comfort in the pot-house, where the village sages were already sitting in council together and discussing the problems of the Future. The other rector, Mr. Thomas Bodza, had read a lot of things in the course of his life.
It represented at that day the evolution of the American tavern, the primitive inn, instituted for passengers and wayfaring men; the development of the pot-house to the metropolitan hotel, of the rural ale-room to the palatial saloon. "What a change from country hostelries!" soliloquized the manager, after the company were installed in commodious rooms.
All were for war, and still believed England would support them if they began. I went to the drinkshops as being the centres from which to distribute information, and told gendarmes, soldiers, and pot-house visitors generally that England Would not go to war for them.
Joe had been offered a three or four days' job; he had accepted it gratefully because it was only for three or four days, and for that period he would be the sober, stolid, British workman. The pleasures of the pot-house would claim him on Saturday, when he would have money in his pockets and the appetite that comes from abstention.
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