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Updated: May 15, 2025
And now, for our pleasure, Sisyphus will take a turn at the stone, and the lovely Danaides of the boxes, in the shining garments of Worth, with soft disdain of difficulty, will essay with sieves of the finest texture to bale out the ocean. The Easy Chair went up lately to the hills to enjoy the annual dinner at Arcadia.
They tell of a man in the moon who is continually employed in spinning cotton, but that every night a rat gnaws his thread and obliges him to begin his work afresh. This they apply as an emblem of endless and ineffectual labour, like the stone of Sisyphus, and the sieves of the Danaides.
If her head aches or her heart is heavy, so that she does not come to time with her story, she falls behindhand and has to live on credit. It sounds well enough to say that "she supports herself by her pen," but her lot is a trying one; it repeats the doom of the Danaides. The "Weekly Bucket" has no bottom, and it is her business to help fill it.
I won't say in American parlance that suddenly the bottom fell out of the whole of de Barral concerns. There never had been any bottom to it. It was like the cask of Danaides into which the public had been pleased to pour its deposits.
Truly, it were enviable to be less apprehensive, less retentive; to be fitted with a colander-mind, like that penal cask which forty-nine Danaïdes might not keep from leaking; to be, sometimes at least, suffered for a holiday to ramble brainless in the paradise of fools.
What with their grammar twistings, their various readings, their dubious punctuations, their mythical, and who knows what other meanings, their hair-splittings, and prosy vocable tiltings, we find at last that they are willing to teach us everything but that which really concerns us, and, like the Danaides, they let the water of life run through the sieve of their learning.
Have you answered any of these attacks?" "No, sir. Had I ever commenced filling the sieve of the Danaides, I should have time for nothing else.
At last, however, by dint of habit he became somewhat used to the disagreeable facts of his new life, and, to use his own words, "bade fair to add one more to the army of bad physicians," when he went to the opera one night and heard "Les Danaïdes," Salieri's opera, performed with all the splendid completeness of the Académie Royale.
He might be compared to the Danaides; the more he got the more he spent. His mistress eventually made a respectable marriage and returned to Paris, where she lived in comfort. At the period of which I am speaking, the Duchess of Brunswick, the king's sister, came to pay him a visit. She was accompanied by her daughter who married the Crown Prince of Prussia in the following year.
The physical sciences have been wheeled forward in the march of mind, and man's earthly path gemmed with all that a merely sensual nature could desire. But, looking aside from these channels, what has it effected for philosophy, that great burden, which constantly recalls the fabled labors of Sisyphus and the Danaides?
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