United States or Cayman Islands ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Si une telle pensee, produite par le degout et la mauvaise humeur, s'empare de moi, que ma tete se fende en dix parties, et mon corps, comme cette fleur de lotus, en mille. "Apres ces mots, il se rendit dans le royaume de l'enfer, prononca les six syllabes et detruisit les peines des enfers frois et chauds.

De ce côté, mais hors des murs, sont de très beaux bains chauds. Il y en a encore au levant, le long du Danube, mais qui ne valent pas les autres.

"Dejeuners froids et chauds," is an inscription which now generally figures on the exterior of a Parisian coffeehouse, beside that of "The a l'Anglaise, Cafe a la creme, Limonade, &c." Solids are here the taste of the times.

Admirable the scale and solidity, in general, of the ancient villas planted about Geneva, and our house affected me as so massive and so spacious that even our own half of it seemed vast. I had never before lived so long in anything so old and, as I somehow felt, so deep; depth, depth upon depth, was what came out for me at certain times of my waiting above, in my immense room of thick embrasures and rather prompt obscurity, while the summer afternoon waned and my companions, often below at dinner, lingered and left me just perhaps a bit overwhelmed. That was the sense of it the character, in the whole place, pressed upon me with a force I hadn't met and that was beyond my analysis which is but another way of saying how directly notified I felt that such material conditions as I had known could have had no depth at all. My depth was a vague measure, no doubt, but it made space, in the twilight, for an occasional small sound of voice or step from the garden or the rooms of which the great homely, the opaque green shutters opened there softly to echo in mixed with reverberations finer and more momentous, personal, experimental, if they might be called so; which I much encouraged (they borrowed such tone from our new surrounding medium) and half of which were reducible to Wilky's personalities and Wilky's experience: these latter, irrepressibly communicated, being ever, enviably, though a trifle bewilderingly and even formidably, of personalities. There was the difference and the opposition, as I really believe I was already aware that one way of taking life was to go in for everything and everyone, which kept you abundantly occupied, and the other way was to be as occupied, quite as occupied, just with the sense and the image of it all, and on only a fifth of the actual immersion: a circumstance extremely strange. Life was taken almost equally both ways that, I mean, seemed the strangeness; mere brute quantity and number being so much less in one case than the other. These latter were what I should have liked to go in for, had I but had the intrinsic faculties; that more than ever came home to me on those occasions when, as I could move further and stay out longer, I accompanied my parents on afternoon visits to Châtelaine and the Campagne Roediger, a scene that has remained with me as nobly placid and pastoral. The great trees stood about, casting afternoon shadows; the old thick-walled green-shuttered villa and its dépendances had the air of the happiest home; the big bearded bonhomie of M. Roediger among his little polyglot charges no petits pays chauds these appeared to justify, and more, the fond New York theory of Swiss education, the kind

"In it one can see three coarse beams or rather trunks of trees from which the boughs have been cut away, each about 12 feet long. As this opening might well have been that of discharge of a stream, now choked, for the Baumes Chauds and its adjoining fissures, one is led at first to suppose that water had brought down these logs that had fallen into some pot-hole.

Of this M. Martel writes: "In a superb cliff of dolomitic limestone of the cirque of the Beaumes Chauds, M. l'Abbe Solanet was good enough to conduct me beneath the Baume des Fadarelles, a chasm inaccessible, at the height of something like 1770 feet in the face of the precipice, something like the openings of Boundoulaou, but much narrower.

In the Vergnès air at any rate I seem myself to have sat unscathed and unterrified not alarmed even by so much as a call to the blackboard; only protected by my insignificance, which yet covered such a sense of our dusky squalor. Queer for us the whole affair, assuredly; but how much queerer for the poor petits pays chauds who had come so far for their privilege.

What really most happened no doubt, was that my brother and I should both come away with a mind prepared for a perfect assimilation of Alphonse Daudet's chronicle of "Jack," years and years later on; to make the acquaintance in that work of the "petits pays chauds" among whom Jack learnt the first lessons of life was to see the Institution Vergnès at once revive, swarming as it did with small homesick Cubans and Mexicans; the complete failure of blondness that marks the memory is doubtless the cumulative effect of so many of the New York "petits pays chauds," preponderantly brown and black and conducing to a greasy gloom.

Oui, c'etait par un soir joyeux de cabaret, Un de ces soirs plutot trop chauds ou l'on dirait Que le gaz du plafond conspire a notre perte Avec le vin du zinc, saveur naive et verte. On s'amusait beaucoup dans la boutique et on Entendait des soupirs voisins d'accordeon Que ponctuaient des pieds frappant presque en cadence.

Others were calling for sale callas and cakes tous chauds in monotonous, drawling voices. Negresses, also, were trying to sell belles chandelles, which were dirty candles made from green myrtle wax, the chief light then sold in the city. The five understood the gestures of this rabble, although not their words, and waved them away, not caring to buy anything.