Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 17, 2025
The fish-wives bent forward and gently touched the turbot with their finger-tips.
And before him arose a vision of the evil year which he had just spent, his persecution by the fish-wives, the sickening sensations he had felt on close, damp days, the continuous indigestion which had afflicted his delicate stomach, and the latent hostility which was gathering strength against him. All these things he now accepted as chastisement.
Here is a second sky faintly blue, with a trailing saffron scarf of cloud; there, the inverted silhouettes of two fish-wives are conical shapes, their coifs and wet skirts startlingly distinct in tones; beyond, sails a fantastic fleet, with polychrome sails, each spar, masthead, and wrinkled sail as sharply outlined as if chiselled in relief.
"Yes, yes," cried the fish-wives in chorus, "when we come back we must see the young dauphin." The queen tried to look as though she heard none of this. Not once had she raised her eyes or turned her head. Now she was coming to the end of her painful walk through the corridors, for Heaven be praised! just before her was the door of her own anteroom.
At times he took an interest in some well-dressed lady trailing her lace petticoats over the damp stones, and escorted by a servant in a white apron; and he would follow her at a little distance on noticing how the fish-wives shrugged their shoulders at sight of her air of disgust.
Mere Mouchard was tossing omelettes from morning till night; even Augustine was far too hurried to pay her usual visit to the creamery. A detachment of Parisian costumes and beribboned nursery maids was crowding out the fish-wives and old hags from their stations on the low door-steps and the grasses on the cliffs.
One or two of the tables were occupied by groups of fat frowzy women in flat caps, with rings on their thumbs, and baskets by their sides; and no one who had listened for a single moment to their coarse language and violent abuse of each other, would require to be told they were fish-wives from Billingsgate.
The fish-wives, seated behind their stalls, leant back knitting, while a few belated purchasers prowled about casting sidelong glances at the remaining fish, with the thoughtful eyes and compressed lips of women closely calculating the price of their dinner.
Not a particle of hair on them, you know, and looking like young elephants, you know; and we saw great droves of oxen, and long lines of booths, no end; and people selling macaroni, and other people eating it right in the open street, you know such fun! and fishermen and fish-wives.
Surely there had never been any beds, or any mussels, or any toiling fish-wives; or if there had, it was all a world that the sea had washed up, and then as quietly, as heedlessly, as pitilessly had obliterated. It was the very epitome of life itself. Our visit to the mussel-bed, as we soon found, had been our formal introduction to the village.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking