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Updated: June 7, 2025
Pécuchet, squatted on a big straw foot-stool, was always carefully forming the pot-hooks of his large handwriting, but all the while swelling his nostrils and pressing his lips together, as if he were afraid of letting his secret slip. After eighteen months of inquiries, they had discovered nothing.
But as her charioteer approached the place where the body of the old king, her father, lay exposed and bloody; the man, amazed at the inhuman spectacle, and not willing to trample upon it with his horses, offered to turn another way; this serving only to increase the fierceness of her anger, she threw the foot-stool at his head, and ordered him to drive over the body without hesitation.
Sclater, on a winter evening, sat there with her husband, whence it came that on the floor squatted a low foot-stool, subject to not unfrequent clerical imprecation: when he stepped back, he trod on the edge of it, stumbled, and fell. Gibbie darted forward.
It opened the next moment as if a cyclone had been behind it. A cyclone, entering a room, is apt to alter the position of things. This cyclone shifted a footstool, a small chair, a rug, and Spike. The chair, struck by a massive boot, whirled against the wall. The foot-stool rolled away. The rug crumpled up and slid.
"Well, let the ladies decide." So he read to them how Ulysses returned in the guise of a beggar, after twenty years of war and wandering to his own palace-door, and saw the haughty suitors revelling in his halls; and how, as he reached the door, Argus, the hunting-dog, now old and neglected, and full of fleas, recollected him, when all had forgotten him, and fawned upon him, and licked his hand and died; and how the suitors insulted him, and one of them threw a foot-stool at him, which by one quick move he avoided, and said nothing, and another flung a shin-bone at his head, which he caught in his hand, and said nothing, but only smiled grimly in his heart ever so little, a grim, sardonic smile and how the old nurse recognised him by the scar of the boar's tusk on his leg, but he quickly repressed the exclamation of wonderment which sprang to her lips; and how he sat, ragged but princely, by the fire in his hall, and the red light flickered over him, and he spake to the suitors words of solemn warning; and how, when Agelaus warned them, a strange foreboding seized their souls, and they looked at each other with great eyes, and smiled with alien lips, and burst into quenchless laughter, though their eyes were filled with tears; and how Ulysses drew his own mighty bow, which not one of them could use, and how he handled it, and twanged the string till it sang like a swallow in his ear, and sent the arrow flying with a whiz through the twelve iron rings of the line of axes; and then, lastly, how, like to a god, he leapt on his own threshold with a shout, and gathered his rags about him, and aided by the young Telemachus and the divine Swineherd, sent hurtling into the band of wine-stained rioters the swift arrows of inevitable death.
Pointing to the human brute crouching there, made once in the image of God, the saddest wreck on His green foot-stool: to the great stealthy body, the revengeful jaws, the foreboding eyes. Soul, brains, a man, wifeless, homeless, nationless, hawked, flung from trader to trader for a handful of dirty shinplasters.
The table always stood under the gable end of the roof, the foot-stool always stood where it was cool, and the big rocking-chair in a glare of sunlight; the lamp, too, he kept down cellar where it was damp. But all these were rather far-fetched, and sometimes quite inconvenient.
The murmurs had just died into a thrilling hush, when a woman, who had followed the monks unperceived and unheeded, passed with a swift and noiseless step to the Duke's foot-stool; and, without bending knee to the ground, said, in a voice which, though low, was heard by all: "Norman, in the name of the women of England, I tell thee that thou darest not do this wrong to the hero who died in defence of their hearths and their children!"
Then Major Hardy suddenly appeared, closing the door, and mopping his face with a handkerchief. His eyes met mine. "By Gad, Galesworth," he began, "woman is the hardest creature to comprehend on this foot-stool. I've been trying to understand them for fifty years, and am still in the primary class.
"Especially when 'tis of a woman who lives for him alone," and the handsome wealthy widow sank into the chair opposite him. "Yes, for an hour, for a day, and 'tis pleasant so you see I know you gay butterflys," he said, lazily placing a foot-stool under the pretty feet of his companion. "Not so," she said slowly, and with a new tenderness in her tones.
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