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Updated: June 22, 2025
"Well then," said he, "first of all, I have to tell you that the common people consider your worship a mighty great madman, and me no less a fool. The hidalgos say that, not keeping within the bounds of your quality of gentleman, you have assumed the 'Don, and made a knight of yourself at a jump, with four vine-stocks and a couple of acres of land, and never a shirt to your back.
Its fine dome, its numerous towers, the large vine-stocks which are rooted in its soil, the air of vast fertility which is spread over the landscape, and the halo of former glory which, cloud-like, rests above it, consort well with one's preconceived ideas of this once illustrious seat of learning, which even the youth of our own land were wont to frequent; but enter it, alas the dismal sight! ruins, filth, ignorance, poverty, on every hand.
Late in the afternoon we reached Viterbo, and stopped to eat a wretched dinner. We found in the hotel but little of that abundance of which the magnificent vine-stocks in the adjoining fields gave so goodly promise.
The time had been when he had not understood the impassioned language of those burning lands, where writhed but knotted vine-stocks, withered almond-trees, and decrepit olives sprawling with crippled limbs. Protected by his ignorance, he had passed undisturbed through all that world of passion. But, to-day, his ear detected the slightest sigh of the leaves that lay panting in the heat.
Consider whether, without being married for I know I am an old maid, and I do not want to smother the blossom of your youth, your poetry, as you call it, in my arms, that are like vine-stocks but whether, without being married, we could not get on together?
"Well then," said he, "first of all, I have to tell you that the common people consider your worship a mighty great madman, and me no less a fool. The hidalgos say that, not keeping within the bounds of your quality of gentleman, you have assumed the 'Don, and made a knight of yourself at a jump, with four vine-stocks and a couple of acres of land, and never a shirt to your back.
"For a man who thinks of nothing but his vine-stocks and poles, he has some spunk," said Lousteau. "Well, he must have something!" replied Bianchon. Madame de la Baudraye, the only person who could hear Bianchon's remark, laughed so knowingly, and at the same time so bitterly, that the physician could guess the mystery of this woman's life; her premature wrinkles had been puzzling him all day.
'Mais, said the Signore, starting from his scene of ignominy, where his wife played with another man's child, 'mais voulez-vous vous promener dans mes petites terres? It came out fluently, he was so much roused in self-defence and self-assertion. We walked under the pergola of bony vine-stocks, secure in the sunshine within the walls, only the long mountain, parallel with us, looking in.
Thus the first cargoes homeward from Vinland to Greenland had been of timber and of raisins, and of vine-stocks, which were not like to thrive. And more. Beyond Vinland the Good there was said to be another land, Whiteman's Land or Ireland the Mickle, as some called it.
Then came the Phylloxera, the vine-stocks perished and the once green table-land is now no more than a desolate stretch where a few tufts of hardy grasses sprout among the pebbles. This waste-land is the Lycosa's paradise: in an hour's time, if need were, I should discover a hundred burrows within a limited range.
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