United States or Guinea-Bissau ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We have turned marriage into opera bouffe, we Americans, and we might as well take it as we've made it. It isn't that at all. It's it's exactly what you said just now: it's like a man swimming away from a sinking ship, and leaving his wife and children to drown, because he can't rescue them. Better a thousand times to go down with them, isn't it?
It reads like opera bouffe, you know they had a regular armed camp across the river for about six months until Captain Kidd went up to Albany with half a million dollars' worth of greenbacks in a satchel, and induced the legislature to legalize the proceedings. That was just after the war, you know, but I remember it as if it were yesterday.
Yet even among Senators there were degrees in dogmatism, from the frank South Carolinian brutality, to that of Webster, Benton, Clay, or Sumner himself, until in extreme cases, like Conkling, it became Shakespearian and bouffe as Godkin used to call it like Malvolio. Sumner had become dogmatic like the rest, but he had at least the merit of qualities that warranted dogmatism.
And they were both loved very much by everyone; and everyone said what a shame it was that he or she hadn't put his or her foot down hard and made Jimmy Blair stay at home instead of letting him go down into that unpronounceable Central American place and get killed in an opera bouffe revolution with which he had absolutely nothing to do except that he couldn't stand idly by and see women and little children shot.
Their work survives, and when you have assessed the monstrous flattery at its true worth, swept it aside and come down to the real facts of his life, you make the discovery that the proudest title their sycophancy could bestow and his own fatuity accept Le Roi Soleil, the Sun-King makes him what indeed he is: a king of opera bouffe.
But on the principle that we can scarcely be said to be moving when all around is moving in a like proportion, Kate learned to regard locality as a mere nothing, and to fix her centre of gravity in the forty human beings who were wandering with her, bound to her by the light ties of opera bouffe. Wherever she went her life remained the same. She saw the same faces, heard the same words.
Now, I maintain it was sent to Dulcie because the sender knew Sir Roland to be away from home and who, but you, knew him to be away? He left only yesterday, and he should return to-night. You knew because, so my niece tells me, she told you in a letter that he was to leave home for a day." "My niece!" Really, Aunt Hannah was qualifying for opera bouffe!
"He thought, up to the last moment, that his wife would be well enough to come." "Did he really believe so, do you think?" Hunterleys asked. A voice intervened. Mr. Draconmeyer was standing by their side. "Well," he said, "we might as well resume our journey. We all look and feel, I think, as though we had been taking part in a scene from some opéra bouffe." Lady Hunterleys shivered.
As we go we carry with us a pleasant noise of laughter and light speech, and some one will be always breaking out into a bar or two of opera bouffe.
When a short time ago M. Huysman went in search of a type to which he could refer Luciferian "blasphemies" and outrages, he could find nothing more suitable to his purpose than Leo Taxil's "Bouffe Jesus."
Word Of The Day