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Updated: June 21, 2025
Odo's grandmother, the old Marchioness, a heavy woman who would doubtless have enjoyed her ease in a cushioned seat, was afoot all day attending to her household; for besides the dairy and the bakehouse and the stillroom where fruits were stewed and pastes prepared, there was the great spinning-room full of distaffs and looms, where the women spun and wove all the linen used in the castle and the coarse stuffs worn by its inmates; with workshops for the cobbler and tailor who clothed and shod the Marquess and his household.
"Come, quick, darling; Monsieur Jacques Dechartre dines at the house to- night, and I should not like to make him wait." And while they were driving through the silence of the night, through the pathways full of the fresh perfume of wildflowers, she said: "Do you see over there, darling, the black distaffs of the Fates, the cypresses of the cemetery? It is there I wish to sleep."
He was not very rich, so he put his children out to trades, and the Distaffs have ever since been employed in the woollen and linen manufactures, except myself, who am a genealogist. Pikestaff, the eldest son by the second venter, was a man of business, a downright plodding fellow, and withal so plain, that he became a proverb. Most of this family are at present in the army.
Half a dozen old hags with the parchment also sat upon the rocks in the sun, spinning from distaffs, exactly as their ancestors did in Greece two thousand years ago, I doubt not. I do not know that it is true, as Tasso wrote, that this climate is so temperate and serene that one almost becomes immortal in it.
It is true, I do not approve what he says; but Plato seems to me, as he hath strangely and unaccountably called the axes spindles and distaffs, and the stars whirls, so to have named the Muses Sirens, as delivering divine things to the ghosts below, as Ulysses in Sophocles says of the Sirens, I next to Phorcus's daughters came, Who fix the sullen laws below.
An hour later, Madame Martin, rested, fresh, in a gown of foulard and lace, went on the terrace where Miss Bell was waiting for her. The humid air, warmed by the sun, exhaled the restless sweetness of spring. Therese, resting on the balustrade, bathed her eyes in the light. At her feet, the cypress-trees raised their black distaffs, and the olive-trees looked like sheep on the hills.
We passed through more deserted villages, with soldiers lounging in the doors where old women should have sat with their distaffs, soldiers watering their horses in the village pond, soldiers cooking over gypsy fires in the farm-yards.
Some one said to me lately, 'La Falourdel, don't use your spinning-wheel too much in the evening; the devil is fond of combing the distaffs of old women with his horns. 'Tis certain that the surly monk who was round about the temple last year, now prowls in the City.
Burr occurs in these poems: 'There the live dimness burrs with droning glees'. #Burr# is, moreover, a bad homophone and cannot neglect possible distinctions: the Oxford Dictionary has eight entries of substantives under burr. Our author also uses whirr: 'And the bleak garrets' crevices Like whirring distaffs utter dread', and again of the noise of wind in ivy, on p. 54, and
In front of the houses are the markets in the open air, fish, vegetables, carts of oranges; in the sun sit women spinning from distaffs or weaving fishing-nets; and rows of children who were never washed and never clothed but once, and whose garments have nearly wasted away; beggars, fishermen in red caps, sailors, priests, donkeys, fruit-venders, street-musicians, carriages, carts, two-wheeled break-down vehicles, the whole tangled in one wild roar and rush and babel, a shifting, varied panorama of color, rags, a pandemonium such as the world cannot show elsewhere, that is what one sees on the road to Resina.
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