United States or Indonesia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It was a farm without any livestock, for there is no grass whatever in that part of France, and consequently no pasture for cattle or sheep. Every one in Nyons kept goats for milk, and, quaintly enough, they fed them on the dried mulberry leaves the silkworms had left over. For every one reared silkworms too, a most lucrative industry.
My friends the Nyons lawyers were fond of alluding to themselves as forming part of the bonne bourgeoisie. It is this bonne bourgeoisie who form the backbone of France.
Six months later I regretfully bid farewell to Nyons, and went direct from there to Germany. After studying the Teutonic tongue for two and a half years at Harrow I was master of just two words in it, ja and nein, so unquestionably there were gaps to fill up.
I always see Nyons with my inner eyes from the terrace in front of the house, the air fragrant with roses, and the soothing gurgle of the fountain below in my ears as it splashed melodiously into its stone reservoir, the little town standing out a vivid yellow against the silver background of olive trees, and the fantastic outlines of the surrounding hills steeped in that wonderful deep Provencal blue.
M. Sisteron, the collector of taxes, himself a native of Nyons, had twenty years before gone to Paris on business, and spent four days there. There were the darkest rumours current in Nyons, to the effect that M. Sisteron had spent these four days in a whirl of the most frantic and abandoned dissipation.
M. Ducros' father had been the Protestant pasteur of Nyons for forty-four years. He was eighty-six years old, and on week-days the old gentleman dozed in the sun all day, and was quite senile and gaga.
The Spiegelbergs treated me extremely kindly, and I was fortunate in being quartered on such agreeable people. At Nyons there was not one single bookseller, but Brunswick bristled with book-shops, and, in addition, there were two of those most excellent lending libraries to be found in every German town.
Ducros was the wife of a French judge, she spoke English perfectly, and must have been in her youth a wonderfully good-looking woman. She was very tall, and still adhered to the dress and headdress of the "sixties," wearing little bunches of curls over each ear a becoming fashion, even if rather reminiscent of a spaniel. The Ducros lived at Nyons in the south of France.
In sun-baked Nyons, water could be got anywhere by driving a tunnel into the parched hillsides, when sooner or later an abundant spring would be tapped. These French trout were either ridiculously unsophisticated, or else very weary of life: they simply asked to be caught. I got quite a heavy basket, to the great joy of the "Frere Hospitalier," and I got far more next day.
The peculiarly French capacity for taking infinite pains, of which a good example is this silkworm culture, has its drawbacks, when carried into administrative work. My friend M. David, the post-master of Nyons, showed me his official instructions. They formed a volume as big as a family Bible. It would have taken years to learn all these regulations.
Word Of The Day