"Old French" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the pommes de terre to be peeled, washed and sliced to the exact size of centuries old French fry. Monsieur was permitted to assist her in this, and wielded the keen bladed knife with precision. Then there was the salad and the seasoning of it to just that degree of the "delicieux" the palate revels in. With the art, as it were, of a magician, she drew ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy
... as with his finger, by a forgery—for he had many minor accomplishments. France fell: and what fell with her was freedom, and what reigned in her stead only tyrants and the ancient terror. The crowning of the first modern Kaiser in the very palace of the old French kings was an allegory; like an allegory on those Versailles walls. For it was at once the lifting of the old despotic diadem and its descent on the low brow of a barbarian. Louis XI. had returned, and not Louis IX.; and Europe was to know that sceptre on which ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... century, in the vigorous times of the old French wars, there was a Monsieur Appert, who had his attention directed to the preservation of things that ordinarily perish, such as meats and vegetables, and in fact he laid the foundation of our modern method of preserving ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... learn with pleasure that its example has been followed, not only by the Old French Text Society which has done such admirable work under its founders Profs. Paul Meyer and Gaston Paris, but also by the Early Russian Text Society, which was set on foot in 1877, and has since issued many excellent editions of old ...
— Early English Meals and Manners • Various
... again in contact with this peculiar civilization. Besides these three sources measurably unprofessional and outside of music, or amateur, as we say now, there was the work of the professional musicians strictly so-called, who, from about 1100 in the old French school, commenced the development of what is now known as polyphony, which culminated in the hands of the Netherlanders, about 1580, Palestrina himself being one of the latest products of this school. ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... of state."] Our verb "to govern" is an Old French word, one of the great host of French words which became a part of the English language between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, when so much French was spoken in England. The French word was gouverner, and its oldest form was the Latin gubernare, ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him reading the old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the 'Divina Commedia', which he magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted with than I was because I knew some passages of it by heart. One day I ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... friend Mr. Wapshott. They sat at a long baize-covered table, with the Justices' Clerk to advise them. On the wall behind and above their heads hung a framed panel emblazoned with the royal escutcheon, the lion and unicorn for supporters, an inscription in old French to the effect that there is shame in evil-thinking, ...
— Lady Good-for-Nothing • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... parcel in the living room. It contained everything they had asked for, and many other things beside, which they had often wished for but had never dreamt of ordering: a calendar with stories, a pound of cooking chocolate, and a bottle of old French wine. "It's just like the Lord," said Ditte in whose mind there were still the remains of the parson's teaching—"when it looks blackest ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... became momentarily lost in reverie, his chin in the palm of his hand, and dreaming thus, Kitty's old French drawing-room and Kitty herself, her blond prettiness accentuated and enhanced by the delicate pinks and blues of her gown, vanished, and Marcia seemed to stand before him all in black and silver as he had seen her recently at a ball, with violets, great purple violets, ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... him. With no woman on earth did he shine so as to recall to himself seigneur and dame of the old French Court as he did with Laetitia Dale. He did not wish the period revived, but reserved it as a garden to stray into when he was in the mood for displaying elegance and brightness in the society of a lady; and in speech Laetitia helped him to the nice delusion. She ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with flowers and fruit occupied the centre of the table, which was covered with silver dishes, after the old French fashion; glass bowls full of salt meats and spices formed a border all around it. Jars of iced red wine stood at regular distances from each other. Five glasses of different sizes were ranged before each plate, with ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... a strange smile, "I am told that you were drinking my health, and I have come to bring you something to drink it again. Here is a bottle of old French brandy which I have chosen for you from my father's cellar. Hold out ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... girl. Handsome, too. Or she would be if she didn't wear English shoes and walk like an elephant. She seems to be interested in Emerson Mead, but old Delarue certainly wouldn't permit anything serious. He's too ardently on our side, or thinks he is, the old French windbag, though he's never even been naturalized. I'll see her again while I'm here and find out if there is anything between them. It might have some consequence for us if there is. I wish the Colonel hadn't got the company so mixed up in their political quarrels. ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... I think, is only to be seen in Canada, or in the sunny climes of those countries bordering on the Mediterranean sea. The little village of Rimouski seemed this afternoon all asleep, for the heat made every one drowsy, and the old French Canadian women at their doorsteps were nodding sleepily over their spinning-wheels. Spinning-wheels, improbable as it sounds to nineteenth century ears, are not yet out of date in this part of the country, and many a table-cloth and fine linen sheet, spun by the women ...
— Marie Gourdon - A Romance of the Lower St. Lawrence • Maud Ogilvy
... powers, except France, whose convention did not go into operation until August 4, the United States being, however, granted up to that date all the privileges and rights accorded to French citizens under the old French treaty. By this notable conventional reform Japan's position as a fully independent sovereign power is assured, control being gained of taxation, customs revenues, judicial administration, coasting trade, ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... against the bold-faced heroines and sensual amours of some of the old French romances, an ideal of exaggerated asceticism, of stainless chastity, notoriously pervades the portion of Malory's work which deals with the Holy Grail. Lancelot is distraught when he finds that, by dint of enchantment, he has been made false to Guinevere ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... change saved through the year, or now and then given to them by indulgent or generous masters, and in fact have a glorious good time! The holidays in New Orleans, and in Louisiana generally, is a time, and no mistake. The old French and Spanish families keep open house—dinners and suppers, music, song and dance. On New Year's eve, they decorate the graves of their friends with flowers. Lamps or lanterns are often required for this purpose, and as you ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... dreadful old French romances, with their horrid spellings of 'filz' and 'ung' and 'ilz' and 'mary' and ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... the beginning of May, count Merci, who commanded them, passed the Po in the face of the allies, notwithstanding all the skill of Villars, obliged him to retreat from the banks of that river, and took the castle of Colorno. The old French general being taken ill, quitted the army, and retired to Turin, where in a little time he died; and the king of Sardinia retiring to the same place, the command of the allied forces devolved upon the mareschal de Coigny. The confederates were posted at ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... a conservative city. First, it was an old French town; then a Southern town; then a German tradesman's town. With such strata superimposed one above the other, it could hardly be other than conservative. In addition, St. Louis was crippled in the war between the states. She lost her market. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... of the Foxes now rose from his seat at the farther end of the enclosure, and walked sedately across the whole open space towards the stand of spectators. His face was painted red, and he wore an old French wig, with its abundant curls in a state of complete entanglement. When he reached the chair of the governor, he bowed, and lifted the wig like a hat, to show that he was perfect in French politeness. There was a burst of ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... nature what an experience it must have been: the majesty of the vast river; the pageant of its immense travel; the steamers heavily laden; the fleets of barges; the many towns; the nights of stars over wide sweeps of water; the stately plantation houses along the banks; the old French city with its crowds, its bells, the shipping, the strange faces and the foreign speech; all the bewildering evidence that there were other ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... old cripple (he would swear sometimes and tipple), He had heard the bullets whistle (in the old French war) before,— Calls out in words of jeering, just as if they all were hearing,— And his wooden leg thumps fiercely on the dusty ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... France there are people surprised at the attachment that I feel for the Crown of England and which I do not conceal. Here that is called loyalisme. (For my part, may I say in passing, I do not like that newly coined expression, loyalisme: I much prefer to keep to the good old French word loyaute.) And certainly, if there is one thing that the story {183} of France has taught me to regard as an attribute of the French race, it is loyalty, it is the heart's memory. I recall, gentlemen, those fine lines ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... shall mention. He observed that, among the families of the old nobility, domestic happiness and virtue had much increased since the Revolution, in consequence of the marriages which, after they lost their wealth and rank, had been formed, not according to the usual fashion of old French alliances, but from disinterested motives, from the perception of the real suitability of tempers and characters. The women of this class in general, withdrawn from politics and political intrigue, were more domestic ...
— Richard Lovell Edgeworth - A Selection From His Memoir • Richard Lovell Edgeworth
... the Comte de Lalain. Unfortunately for me, the gentleman was absent, and his lady only was in the castle. The courtyard being open, we entered it, which put the lady into such a fright that she ordered the bridge to be drawn up, and fled to the strong tower.—[In the old French original, 'dongeon', whence we have 'duugeon'.]—Nothing we could say would induce her to give us entrance. In the meantime, three hundred gentlemen, whom Don John had sent off to intercept our passage, and take possession of the castle of Fleurines; ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... sweep of country and the city clustering round the towers of Notre Dame. It is, from almost any point of view, a beautiful city, for its merchants and financiers of English and Scottish extraction have emulated the love of artistic symmetry displayed by the old French Canadian religious orders, as well as their lavish expenditure, in the buildings they have raised. Churches, hospitals, banks and offices delight the eye, and no pall of coal-smoke floats over Montreal. It lies clean and sightly between its mountain and the ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... in the old French town was alive with market carts, which lumbered noisily over the cobble stones, while around the pavements, stalls and barrows did a roaring trade. It was market-day, and the hot summer sun shone down on ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... just what they were," answered Kit, cheerfully, "but I think they're awfully interesting. Don't you think that they look like the Breton fisher people in some of the old French paintings? That girl looked just exactly like the youngest one crossing the sands at low tide at St. Malo. We have the painting at home, and I love it. And there was another girl about thirteen that I saw staring at me from the ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester
... was pouring out of the afternoon concert in Festival Hall. The architect, as he looked on, remarked: "It's like being in Paris, isn't it? Or, perhaps, it's more like being in a lovely old French provincial city, where the theater is the chief architectural monument. It's hard for me to understand why the French have encouraged that kind of architecture for their theaters and opera houses. It seems ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... the finest culture, and was often, and never vainly, consulted by his son Robert concerning the more recondite facts relating to the old characters, whose bones that poet liked so well to disturb. His knowledge of old French, Spanish, and Italian literature was wonderful. The old man went smiling and peaceful to his long rest, preserving his faculties to the last, insomuch that the physician, astonished at his continued calmness and ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... negro women of the old French quarters in New Orleans used to make a delicious rice cake, which they carried in bowls on their heads. The bowls were covered with an immaculately clean cloth and the cakes were called bella cala—tout chaud ...
— Mrs. Wilson's Cook Book - Numerous New Recipes Based on Present Economic Conditions • Mary A. Wilson
... the rear-guard points in an indifferent sort of a way to a substantial brick edifice surmounted by a plain wooden cross. Ah! a Jesuit mission, so help me Pius IX! now shall I meet some genial old French priest, who will make me comfortable for the night and enlighten me in regard to my bearings, distances, and other subjects about which I am in a very thick fog. Instead of the fifty miles from Kan-tchou-foo to Ki-ngan-foo ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... their serfdom under the laws of Delaware. The French bonnes stood on washing-benches in the Brandywine, and taught the amazed Quaker wives that laundry-work could be done in cold water. The names of grand old French families, prefaced by the proprietarial forms of le and du, became mixed by marriage with such Swedish names as Svensson and such Dutch names as Staelkappe. (The first Staelkappe was a ship's cook, nicknamed from his oily and glossy bonnet.) As for the refugees from Santo Domingo, they absolutely ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... either necessity or cause, was a peculiar, and perhaps the most prominent, feature of chivalry. It was not merely the duty, but the pride and delight, of a true knight, to perform such exploits, as no one but a madman would have undertaken. I think it is in the old French romance of Erec and Eneide, that an adventure, the access to which lay through an avenue of stakes, garnished with the bloody heads of the knights who had attempted and failed to atchieve it, is called by the ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... of the network of tracks behind Colon. As it gained speed Mrs. Cortlandt, to divert her guest's mind from his recent ordeal, began to explain the points of interest as they passed. She showed him the old French workings where a nation's hopes lay buried, the mechanical ruins that had cost a king's ransom, the Mount Hope Cemetery, whither daily trains had borne the sacrifice before science had robbed the fever of its terrors. She told him, also, something of the railroad's ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... Sometimes a chance purchase may shape the entire course of a man's collecting, sometimes he is led to the subject to which he devotes his collecting energies by devious byways. Our book-hunter has a friend who began to collect old French books on Chivalry through a touch of influenza. When convalescent his doctor ordered him a sea-voyage. An hour after the advice was given he met a shipping friend, who offered him a cabin in a ship just about to start on a trading voyage in the Mediterranean. ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... more questions about himself than any of them had done. Her conversation with Mrs. Temperly was of an intimate, domestic order, and full of social, personal allusions, which Raymond was unable to follow. It appeared to be concerned considerably with the private affairs of the old French noblesse, into whose councils—to judge by the tone of the Marquise—Cousin Maria had been admitted by acclamation. Every now and then Madame de Brives broke into French, and it was in this tongue that she uttered an apostrophe to her hostess: 'Oh, you, ma toute-bonne, you who ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... from "First Steps in Collecting," by Grace M. Vallois, gives an interesting glimpse of an old French attic. An object of great interest to us is the old, unfinished quilt she discovered there: "A rummaging expedition in a French grenier yields more treasures than one taken in an English lumber room. The French ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... An exclamation, meaning originally "much thanks" (Old French grand merci), and so used by Shakespeare ("Merchant of Venice" II., 2, 128, "Richard III" III., 2, 108). But in the ballads it is often a mere exclamation of wonder and surprise, and so Coleridge uses ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... was afforded them. This was General Lahorie, a man of superior education, main supporter of Malet in his daring plot to take the government into the Republicans' hands during the absence of Napoleon I. in Russia. Lahorie read old French and Latin with Victor till the police scented him out and led ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... that any man might look forward to after a hard day on Capitol Hill. Its easychairs were very soft and deep, its rugs were rosy and delicate, and the walls and windows and doors were hung with one of those old French silk stuffs with a design of royal conventionality and uniformly old rose in colour. All of Betty's own books were there, her piano, several handsome pieces of carved oak, and a unique collection of ivory. Betty had banished the former girlish simplicity ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... Nowhere," "The Glittering Plain," "The Wood beyond the World," "The Well at the World's End," "The Water of the Wondrous Isles," and "The Sundering Flood." During the same years he also translated, out of Icelandic and old French books, more of the stories which he had long known and admired. "The Sundering Flood" was written in his last illness, and finished by him within a few days of his death, in ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... snow blew about the lonely telegraph shack where Jim Dearham studied an old French romance. He read rather by way of mental discipline than for enjoyment, and partly with the object of keeping himself awake. Life is primitive in the British Columbian bush and Jim sometimes felt he must ...
— Partners of the Out-Trail • Harold Bindloss
... room, the faded brocade of its furniture, reveal him as a man of delicate taste and somewhat thin intellectuality. He stands now before a noiseless fire, contemplating with a troubled eye either the pattern of the Old French carpet, or the black double doors of the library opposite, or the moulding on the Adams ceiling, which the flicker of all the candles casts into deeper relief. His grey hair and black clothes would melt into the decoration of his room, were the figure ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... enriched him. The stern dignity of Indian chiefs, the dusky loveliness of Indian girls, the domestic life of wigwams, the stealthy march, the battle beneath gloomy pine trees, the frontier fortress with its garrison, the anomaly of the old French partisan bred in courts, but grown gray in shaggy deserts,—such were the scenes and portraits that he had sketched. The glow of perilous moments, flashes of wild feeling, struggles of fierce power, love, hate, grief, frenzy—in a word, all ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Violet—is an old French variety, everywhere esteemed; it has sixteen synonyms; fruit ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... preventing the French half-breeds from buying and selling furs with the Indians was being carried out by Judge Thom, the relentless ogre of the law. Four men of the Metis had been arrested; of these the leader was William Sayer. He was the half-breed son of an old French bourgeois of the Northwest Company. He had been liberated on bail, and was to come up for trial in May. The charge against him was of buying goods with which to go on a trading ...
— The Romantic Settlement of Lord Selkirk's Colonists - The Pioneers of Manitoba • George Bryce
... publication of several literary reviews, notably the Censor americano (1820), the Biblioteca americana (1823) and the Repertorio americano (1826-27), and in these he published many of his most important works. Here appeared his studies of Old French and of the Song of My Cid, his excellent translation of fourteen cantos of Boiardo's Orlando innamorato, several important articles on Spanish syntax and prosody, and the best of all his ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... a lady in her own right; we called her Lady Catherine, and a prouder woman never owned either estate or title. Her father had been a branch of the Highland family to whom the property originally belonged. Her mother was sprung from the old French nobility, an emigrant of the first Revolution, and she had been brought up in England, and married in due time to an Honourable Mr —— there. When she first came to the estate, her husband had been some years dead, and Lady Catherine brought with her ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... was unalterable in his resolution—he only changed when he had reasons of his own—and the course of the Ark was laid, accordingly, for the old French coast of the Landes, so low that it was now covered with nearly four thousand feet of water. The feelings of the passengers were deeply stirred when they learned that they were actually sailing over buried Europe, and they gazed in astonishment at the ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... the gilt dome of the Hotel des Invalides, and the white flag upon the bronze-pillar in the Place Vendome; seen crowds of our countrymen at Meurice's and in the hotels about the Rue de la Paix; partaken of the rival ices of Tortoni and the Caffe des Mille Colonnes; bought old French poetry at a Bouquiniste's: and drank Chambertin and Champagne at the richly garnished table of our ——. These are what may be called good foreground objects in the composition of a Parisian picture. Now for the filling up of the canvas ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... difference whether there was a roomful of listeners, or only a couple, Fiddlin' Jack was just as glad to play. With a little, quiet audience, he loved to try the quaint, plaintive airs of the old French songs—"A la Claire Fontaine," "Un Canadien Errant," and "Isabeau s'y Promene"—and bits of simple melody from the great composers, and familiar Scotch and English ballads—things that he had picked up heaven knows where, and ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... up the day of the Conference with a delightful little dinner at St.-Quentin. The traditions of the old French cuisine are not yet extinct in the provinces, nor, for that matter, in the private life of the true Parisians of Paris. They all centre in the famous saying of Brillat-Savarin, that a man may learn how to cook, but must be born to roast—a saying ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... forms of government. The fact is undoubted; but the means which they employed are uncertain. It appears most probable that this great privilege was the price of their military services; for they held a high place in the victorious armies of Charlemagne; and Turpin, the old French romancer, alluding to the popular traditions of his time, represents the warriors of Friesland as endowed with ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... now took the place of the former ecclesiastical governor of an institution called in former times L'Economat; an establishment connected with the general agency of the old French clergy, and founded by the long-sighted genius of Richelieu. Thuillier's name opened for him the doors of the salon, where sat enthroned in velvet and gold, amid the most magnificent "Chineseries," the poor woman who weighed with all her avoirdupois on the hearts and minds of princes ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... of the Latin, there is none more degenerate than theirs, forasmuch as its quaintness ariseth from its sweetnesse, so that it is not attainable without a strange descent from its principle. Thus le Capo of the Italians, le Cabo, of the Spaniards, le Cap, of the old French and le Kef of Picardy are all variously alterd from Caput of the Latins, but none so much as le Chef of the French, which notwithstanding claims ...
— A Philosophicall Essay for the Reunion of the Languages - Or, The Art of Knowing All by the Mastery of One • Pierre Besnier
... it was trying when Colonel Newcome said Adsum, and the end of Socrates in the Phaedo moved one more than seemed becoming—these, and a passage in the history of Skalagrim Lamb's Tail, and, as I said, the ruin of the Athenians in the Syracusan Bay. I have read these chapters in an old French version derived through the Italian from a Latin translation of Thucydides. Even in this far-descended form, the tale keeps its pathos; the calm, grave stamp of that tragic telling cannot be worn away by much handling, by long ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... England and joining their merchant service was entirely with that design. All has worked out exactly as I expected. I have made several successful voyages to the West Coast of Africa, so that there was no difficulty in my obtaining the command of this one. One by one I got these old French man-of-war's-men among the hands. As to you, I was anxious to have one tried fighting man in case of resistance, and I also desired to have a fitting companion for the Emperor during his long homeward voyage. My cabin is already fitted up for ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... like a school of religion and of every virtue. They lived there as in a monastery. There was a lecture during meals; in the morning they read history, and at supper the lives of saints. After that they said their prayers, and Champlain had introduced the old French custom of ringing the church bells three times a day, during the recitation of the Angelus. At night, every one was invited to go to Champlain's room for the night's prayer, ...
— The Makers of Canada: Champlain • N. E. Dionne
... The old French chateaux, according to Froisart, were rarely without secret means of escape. King Louis XVI., famous for his mechanical skill, manufactured a hiding-place in an inner corridor of his private apartments at the Palace of Versailles. The wall where it was situated was painted to imitate ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... Thame, enough to stain blue a whole tribe of ancient Britons, and also that on a wall by the roadside between Reading and Pangbourne he discovered several plants of the deadly nightshade, or "dwale." This word is said to be derived from Old French deuil, mourning; but its present form looks very English. The only cases of plant poisoning now common among grown-up people are those caused by mistaking fungi for mushrooms, or by making rash experiments in cooking the former, of which Gerard quaintly ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... was at that moment in the humour to go anywhere, and because his money was running low, and he must begin work somehow. He was still romantic enough to like the notion of the place a little, because it bore the name given to it by the old French voyageurs from a herd of buffalo cows which they had seen grazing on the site of their camp there; but when he came to the place itself he did not like it. He hated it; but he stayed, and as an architect was the last thing any one wanted in Des Vaches since the jail and court-house had been built, ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... another and another until half-a-dozen or more were bounding and leaping around the girl beside me. She caressed and quieted them with her gloved hand, speaking to them in quaint terms which I remembered to have seen in old French manuscripts. ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... success in story-telling was 'The Midge,' which appeared in 1886. It is a tale of New York life in the interesting old French quarter of South Fifth Avenue. Again, in 'The Story of a New York House,' he displayed the same quick feeling for the spirit of the place, as it was and is. This tale first appeared in the newly founded Scribner's Magazine, to which he has ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... only too willing to pay. He had found a girl of high spirits, of great good looks, of a most amusing quickness of wit and vigour of mentality. He married her, to the scandal of everybody, and carried her from her poverty to the fine old French-days mansion in Gage. ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... commission which admirably suited the tastes and spirits of my worthy St. Clair, to whom, you will have observed, I had accustomed myself to talk with the peculiar familiarity which the old French comedy establishes ...
— The Room in the Dragon Volant • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... 20. The metric barometric scale is now used in Russia. In a few European countries the French or Paris line, equalling 0.088814 in., is sometimes used. The English measure of length being a standard at 62deg Fahr., the old French measure at 61.2deg, and the metric scale at 32deg, it is necessary, before comparing observations made with the three barometers, to reduce them to the same temperature, so as to neutralize the inequalities arising from the expansion of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... croquet is derived from the same source as hockey. The old French word "hoquet," meaning a "crooked stick" has very much the same meaning as the word "croquet." Both are excellent outdoor sports that guests at a house party ...
— Book of Etiquette • Lillian Eichler
... love-theme is as primary as Pierre Loti's, for Zola has the eye for masses, not for individual subtleties. Tolstoi, informed by something of the rage of the old ascetics, is too iconoclast; Maupassant's stories sometimes suggest a cynicism as profound as Chamfort's or that old French ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... Consul's charity are the hardest to be denied are those who have no country,—-Hungarians, Poles, Cubans, Spanish-Americans, and French republicans. All exiles for liberty come to me, if the representative of America were their representative. Yesterday, came an old French soldier, and showed his wounds; to-day, a Spaniard, a friend of Lopez,—bringing his little daughter with him. He said he was starving, and looked so. The little girl was in good condition enough, and ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bread of liberty is sweet, but when you are starving you should not over-eat yourself. An old French writer says: ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... when the watch was called, the schooner was put under short canvas, and due preparations were made for any change in the weather. The starboard watch was then told to go below, but to "be ready for a call." This watch, all told, consisted of the old French carpenter and myself, and we gladly descended into the narrow, leaky, steaming den, called the forecastle, reposing full confidence in the vigilance of our shipmates in the larboard watch, and knowing that if the ship should be dismasted, or even ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... faction. But the times are difficult and men are wanting; the middle classes are pressing on, and there are men enough there of fortune, energy, activity, zeal, and ambition—no Cannings perhaps or Broughams, but a host of fellows of the calibre of the actors in the old French Constituent Assembly. ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... a brilliant, wicked, feminine mover of things in some old French court?" he said ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... acts charmingly as young Mrs. Goldfinch; Miss HORLOCK is very nice as Lucy Lorimer, delivering herself of a little bit of picturesque sentiment about feeding the birds (Les Petits Oiseaux is the title of the old French piece, if I remember rightly) in a rather too forcedly ingenuous manner, but behaving most naturally in the interrupted courtship scene, and being generally very sympathetic. I mustn't omit Miss HUNTER, pink of parlour-maids, not the conventional flirty soubrette nor the low-comedy waiting-woman, ...
— Punch, or, the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 8, 1890. • Various
... grass-green plumes for you, like Queen Guinevere's, nor yet the free flowing feather to be seen in so many beautiful old French pictures, nor the plumed hat which "my sweet Mistress Ann Dacre" wore when Constance Sherwood's loving eyes first fell upon her, but the simple jockey cap, exactly matching your habit, and costing two dollars and a half or three dollars; the Derby cap for the same price or a little ...
— In the Riding-School; Chats With Esmeralda • Theo. Stephenson Browne
... arrive at a square, planted with rows of fine oaks close together; at the upper end stands the house, all on the ground-floor, but on a high stoep: rooms eighteen feet high; the old slave quarters on each side; stables, &c., opposite; the square as big as Belgrave Square, and the buildings in the old French style. ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... men: written in their holy scripture. To thende that the Kynge admonisshed by the example of theim, might ordre his gouernaunce iustlye, and godly, and not geue hym selfe to couetous cloinyng, [Footnote: Probably from the old French, encloyer, to glut, or surfeit.] and hourdyng of tresure. He neither satte to iudge, ne toke his vocacion, ne walked abrode, ne washed at home, ne laye with his Quiene, ne finally did any maner of thing, but vpon ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries - Vol. II • Richard Hakluyt
... Mounier at their head, to reproduce a feeble copy of it in France. Their failure is too well known to the world: how their English ideas were scouted by the people, while a far more radical revolution swept away every vestige of the old French Constitution, without substituting in its stead any thing save crude and infidel ideas, which ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... every day in the week. Me number's 415"—He was about handing me a greasy bit of paper, when I slammed the door in his face and retired to my own room to meditate on the strange accent and peculiar calling of this descendant of the "fine old French settler." ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... the old French war, and, being a man of tried courage and presence of mind, he was usually selected for dangerous and trying situations. He was at length placed on a recruiting station, and in a short period he enlisted a great number of men. Among his recruits was Frank Lilly, a boy about sixteen years old, ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... garden proper, a real old-fashioned one, containing many berry bushes, fruit trees, and a few old-fashioned flowers, ran right back to the river. A brick boundary wall kept the river from washing away the banks, and brick steps led down to a little floating platform. There was much shade in that old French garden; it was the most peaceful and restful place that I ever found in France. Even aeroplanes sailing overhead on their missions of destruction seemed from my garden ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... the appearance of a French Ville de Province, and is, in fact, an old French colony taken from Spain by France. The names of the streets are French, and the language about equally French and English. The market is handsome and well supplied, all produce being conveyed by the river. We were much pleased by the chant with which the Negro boatmen regulate and beguile their ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... the Luxembourg, in the salons of which the adorable Josephine so well performed the honours, that the word 'Madame' came again into use. This first return towards the old French politeness was startling to some susceptible Republicans; but things were soon carried farther at the Tuileries by the introduction of 'Votre Altesse' on occasions of state ceremony, and Monseigneur ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... which regularly represents it. A second element of the "accent du Midi" just referred to is the substitution of an open for a close o. The vowel sound of the word peur is not distinguished from the close sound in peu. In the orthography of the Felibres the diagraph ue is used as we find it in Old French to represent this vowel. Probably the most striking feature of the pronunciation is the unusual number of diphthongs and triphthongs, both ascending and descending. Each vowel preserves its proper sound, and the component vowels seem to be pronounced more slowly and separately ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... horses were distributed, as far as they would go, amongst the carriages: the hearse which originally had four, was now therefore drawn by six. A jolly boatswain, who had armed his heels with a pair of immense old French spurs, rode the leaders—a couple of huge broad-backed plough horses: his mourning cloak he used by way of saddle; and in lieu of whip he produced the "cat" of the Fleurs-de-lys. The two hinder pairs were driven with long reins by a sailor whose off leg was a wooden one: this he turned ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... accordant sounds, it follows that the varying rhythmical impulses of poets and of readers will demand now a greater and now a less dependence upon this particular mode of rhythmical satisfaction. Chaucer complained of the scarcity of rhymes in English as compared with their affluence in Old French, and it is true that rhyming is harder in our tongue than in the Romance languages. We have had magicians of rhyme, like Swinburne, whose very profusion of rhyme-sounds ends by cloying the taste of many a reader, and sending him back ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... (man'or): see plan of a manor (Old French manoir, "a mansion") on page 75, the estate of a feudal lord. Every manor had two courts. The most important of these was the "court baron." It was composed of all the free tenants of the manor, with the lord ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... frseuated eyes, a short nose, flanked by widely distended nostrils, round cheeks, a square chin, thick, but not curling lips—this unattractive and ludicrous physiognomy, sometimes animated by an expression of cunning which recalls the shrewd face of an old French peasant, is often lighted up by gleams of gentleness and of melancholy good-nature. The external characteristics of these two principal types in the ancient monuments, in all varieties of modifications, may still be seen among the living. The profile ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... that I was invited to dine at the house of an aristocratic subject of the old French regime. I did not know the family, and a previous engagement tempted me to decline the invitation; but one of those mysterious impulses which are in fact the messengers of Destiny compelled me to go, and I went. Thus slight may be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... valley," because in former times, according to some annotators, the courtiers wore natural or artificial lilies of the valley in their buttonholes, and perfumed themselves with the essence of that flower. I think that muguet is connected with the old French word musguet, smelling of musk. In Molire's time muguet had become rather antiquated; hence it was rightly placed in the mouth of Sganarelle, who likes to use such words and phrases. Rabelais employs it in the eighth chapter of Gargantua, ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... Piron; there is a fate marked out for us all, and we should not exclaim against the decrees of Providence. Paul went with me across the river. There, on the bank, was a little bower of an old French-built stone house, where dwelt the last of a line of French nobility who dated back to the days of Charlemagne. It was an impoverished family, consisting of a reckless brother and two sisters, who, with a few acres of sugar-cane and some old faithful servants, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... felt as one again at home. Here were the sanded floors, the old water-bottles, the large chandelier with its cut glasses in the middle of the room, the small tables with their coarse clean linen. The same old French waiters stood here and there about, each with impeccable apron and very peccable shoes, as is the wont of all waiters. But the waiters at Luigi's are more than waiters; they are friends, and they never forget a face. Therefore, as always, I had no occasion for surprise when Jean, ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... tell about what happened to him when his division was last back in rest billets. He had a staff job and put up with the divisional command at an old French chateau. They had only a little bit of the house; the rest was shut up, but the passages were so tortuous that it was difficult to keep from wandering into the unoccupied part. One night, he said, he woke with a mighty thirst, and, since he wasn't going to get cholera by drinking the local water ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... sprang from the corruption of the Latin were called by the common name of romans. The name was then applied to any piece of literature composed in this vernacular instead of in the ancient classical Latin. And as the favorite kind of writing in Provencal, Old French, and Spanish was the tale of chivalrous adventure that was called par excellence, a roman, romans, or romance. The adjective romantic is much later, implying, as it does, a certain degree of critical attention to the species of fiction which it describes in order to a generalizing ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... often used in these pages, and which is so familiar to one who has lived much with Indians as to need no explanation, is the phrase to count coup. Like many of the terms common in the Northwest, this one comes down to us from the old French trappers and traders, and a coup is, of course, a blow. As commonly used, the expression is almost a direct translation of the Indian phrase to strike the enemy, which is in ordinary use among all tribes. This striking is the ...
— Blackfoot Lodge Tales • George Bird Grinnell
... hear of our own men, like C.S.M. Shields, Sgt. Tabbron, etc., who had been left behind as battle surplus, going down gassed. Fortunately, most of them rejoined the battalion later. During this day's fighting some L.F's. were staggered to find an old French woman in a cellar in Bucquoy, and they had the utmost difficulty in persuading her to leave her "home." That was her abode and she was prepared to live ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... third subject of chivalric verse was Arthur of the Round Table; but this, at the time, was also invested with Oriental wonders and attachments. Other chivalric poetry of this epoch had to do with Godfrey of Bouillon, the Crusades, and old French tales and fabliaux which were brought into Europe by the oral ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... station—then a football field, with a violent game going on—a Casualty Clearing Station, almost a large hospital—another football match!—a battery of eighteen-pounders on the march, and beyond an old French market town crowded with lorries and men. In the midst of it D—— suddenly draws my attention to a succession of great nozzles passing us, with their teams and limbers. I have stood beside the forging and tempering of their ...
— Towards The Goal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... His doggerel verse, "We seek him here, we seek him there," etc., was sung to the tune of "Ho! Merry Britons!" and to the accompaniment of glasses knocked loudly against the table. Lord Grenville, moreover, had a most perfect cook—some wags asserted that he was a scion of the old French NOBLESSE, who having lost his fortune, had come to seek it in the CUISINE ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... non? Serai-je nonnette? je crois que non. Derriere chez mon pere Il est un bois taillis, Le rossignol y chante Et le jour et le nuit. Il chaste pour les filles Qui n'ont pas d'ami; Il ne chante pas pour moi, J'en ai un, Dieu merci.'—OLD FRENCH.] ...
— Ballads and Lyrics of Old France: with other Poems • Andrew Lang
... Highness will permit," she said, "Mademoiselle Candeille will give us some of her charming old French ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... that he was a better Grecian than I, and could enlighten my ignorance." From other sources I learn that in his legal studies he delighted in the reports of law cases in Norman French, that he was fond of old French literature, and read Rabelais in the perplexing French of the original. It is mentioned in some accounts of his life that he was elected in 1811 to the New York House of Assembly by a party called the malcontents, but I have ...
— A Discourse on the Life, Character and Writings of Gulian Crommelin - Verplanck • William Cullen Bryant
... sight. Some of these legends, though exceedingly beautiful, will hardly bear close examination in the light of Catholic dogma. Of this class is "The Faithful Soul," of Adelaide Procter, which is merely given here as an old French legend, nearly connected with Purgatory, and having really nothing in it contrary to faith, though in a high degree improbable, but yet from its intrinsic beauty and dramatic character, no less than the subtle ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... was southeast, leading through the present States of Wyoming, Colorado and into Kansas, where they struck the trail of the year before. This was followed across Missouri, and, without mishap, all four reached in due time that old French ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... years after the massacre of St. Bartholomew, they were so numerous and wealthy as to be able to build a handsome temple, almost alongside the cathedral, and it still stands there in the street called Rue du Temple, with the motto over the entrance, in old French, "Cerches et vos troveres." But at the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the temple was seized by the King and converted into a granary, and the Protestants of the place were either executed, banished, or forced to conform to the Papal religion. Since then the voice of Protestantism ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... wonderful assembly, the Garcia family, had found themselves in New York, where an old French merchant, supposed to be rich, married her. It is certain that Malibran married the old merchant for his money—a thing so common that one cannot stop to express indignation. The horrible thing is that, as it turned out, the old man had also ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... several akin to the one described by M. Zola. I suspect that they largely owed their origin to the form and dimensions of the ordinary Parisian kitchen stove, which did not enable people to roast poultry at home in a convenient way. In the old French cuisine, moreover, roast joints of meat were virtually unknown; roasting was almost entirely confined to chickens, geese, turkeys, pheasants, etc.; and among the middle classes people largely bought their poultry already cooked of the rotisseur, ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... appearance of originality. A reforming age is always fertile of impostors. The same excited state of public feeling which produced the great separation from the see of Rome produced also the excesses of the Anabaptists. The same stir in the public mind of Europe which overthrew the abuses of the old French Government, produced the Jacobins and Theophilanthropists. Macpherson and Della Crusca were to the true reformers of English poetry what Knipperdoling was to Luther, or Clootz to Turgot. The success ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... for occupation. Had I had time, I could not, being a minister, have entered the premises. To me, and to all like me, "Procul, procul, este, profani" is chiselled on every stone!—a singular monument of the priest-hating propensities of the old French Revolutionists. ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... drawing an impassable line between ghosts and eternal gods. The word Kalou is applied to all supernal beings, and mystic or magical things alike. It seems to answer to mana in New Zealand and Melanesia, to wakan in North America, and to fee in old French, as when Perrault says, about Bluebeard's key, 'now the key was fee.' All Gods are Kalou, but all things that are Kalou are not Gods. Gods are Kalou vu; deified ghosts are Kalou yalo. The former are eternal, without beginning ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... was haughty too, but gracious enough to those who pleased her dainty fancy. In the old French house on Royal Street, with its quaint windows and Spanish courtyard green and cool, and made musical by the plashing of the fountain and the trill of caged birds, lived Odalie in convent-like seclusion. Monsieur le Juge was determined no hawk ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... that the gig built to carry one is made to carry fifteen, I am, of course, expected to explain how this is accomplished. There is an old French proverb, according to which, when there is enough for one there is enough for two; but I am not aware of any proverb in any language which says, that when there is enough for one, there is enough for fifteen. Nevertheless, it is the case with the corricolo. In the present advanced state of civilization, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... failed to reveal any presence (barring the rats), bodily or otherwise, the bravest of them would hesitate many a long minute before he would enter the haunted spot after nightfall. Rumour has it that the Guest House is built on the site of an old French cemetery. Our "irrepressible Ike" therefore cannot lack for society, though how congenial it is cannot be determined. Judging from the records of the ceaseless rows between the French and English on Le Petit Nord, there must be some lively nights ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... old French doctor then! I rejoice in a Frenchman, for the frank abandon with which he gives himself up to his emotions! Our doctor, after staring at the confession, took hold of the top of his blue tasseled night-cap, pulled it off his head and ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... misgovernment, were indemnified for oppression by being suffered to luxuriate in anarchical speculation, and to deny or ridicule every principle on which the institutions of the State reposed. Neither those who attribute the downfall of the old French institutions to the public grievances, nor those who attribute it to the doctrines of the philosophers, appear to us to have taken into their view more than one half of the subject. Grievances as heavy have often been endured without producing a revolution; doctrines ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Then the ancient bond of brotherhood would again have been knit together as firmly as in old times. The habit of loyalty which had grown as strong as instinct was not utterly overcome. The perils shared, the victories won in the Old French War, when the soldiers of the colonies fought side by side with their comrades from beyond the sea, were unforgotten yet. England was still that beloved country which the colonists called their home. King George, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... distributed in considerable numbers also in the second tier of counties. A broad band of French and English Canadians overlaps the northern hem of United States territory from Maine to North Dakota.[366] In the New York and New England counties bordering on the old French province of Quebec, they constitute from 11 to 22 per cent. of the total population, except in two or three western counties of Maine which have evidently been mere passways for a tide of habitants ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... one of those tributes of delicate feeling, of good taste, and sincere respect which from time to time remind us of the virtues and dignity of the old French nobility. Following the Marshal's bier came the old Marquis de Montauran, the brother of him who, in the great rising of the Chouans in 1799, had been the foe, the luckless foe, of Hulot. That Marquis, killed by the balls of the "Blues," had confided the interests of his young brother ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... the Kotzebue had the air of an old French town-house, and was, in fact, built by a French architect in the days of Stanislaus Augustus, when Warsaw aped Paris. It stands back from the road behind high railings, and, at the farther end of a paved court-yard, ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... Urn-Burial certainly has much of the character of a poem, yet one is never allowed to forget that it was designed, candidly, as a scientific treatise on one department of ancient "culture" (as much so as Guichard's curious old French book on Divers Manners of Burial) and was the fruit of much labour, in the way especially of industrious selection from remote and difficult writers; there being then few or no handbooks, or anything like our modern shortcuts to varied ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... learnt to turn over leaves from the top, to avoid dogs' ears, and generally to treat books properly and put them away punctually. Thus I got the grammar, and carried it off to the swing. Alas! it was not even Russian and English. It was a fat old French edition, interleaved for notes. The notes were my father's, and in English, which was of some assistance, and I set myself resolutely to learn the alphabet. But my progress was slow, and at last ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... them. Steps are now taking by Government to send persons into the counties to purchase these libels, with a view to indictments at the Christmas Quarter Sessions; but this is a thing that can be done but once, and could not be continued without an expense equal to that of the old French police. Our laws suppose magistrates and Grand Juries to do this duty, and if they do it not, I have little faith in its being done by a Government such as the Constitution has made ours. If you look back to the last time in our history that these sort of things ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... . ." There is so much in that wicked old French proverb! Had Frank known more about a woman's mind—had he, that is, been forty-two instead of twenty-two—he would at once have been sure of his game, and have felt that Mary's silence told him all he wished to know. But then, had he been forty-two instead of twenty-two, he would not have ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... and lai, are so often used indifferently by the old French writers, that it is difficult to lay down any positive rule for discriminating between them. But I believe the word roman particularly applies to such works as were to be supposed strictly historical: such ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... cannot extend to sixty volumes, we have aimed at pleasing children, not 'grown-ups,' at whom the old French writers directed their romances, but have hunted for fairy tales in all quarters, not in Europe alone. In this volume we open, thanks to Dr. Ignaz Kuenos, with a story from the Turks. 'Little King Loc' is an original invention by M. Anatole France, which he very kindly permitted Mrs. ...
— The Olive Fairy Book • Various
... a tendency peculiarly and especially Anglo-Saxon, the ingrained Latinity of de Gourmont's mind indignantly revolts. His point of view is entirely and absolutely classical, in the old French sense of that suggestive word and in accordance with the great French traditions of Rabelais, Voltaire, Stendhal, Renan, and ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... satisfactory. The merits, however, of these Ballads are not technical merely, or rather, the technical merits are well subordinated to the production of the general effect. About the nature of that effect much ink has been shed. It is produced equally by Greek hexameters, by old French assonanced tirades, by English "eights and sixes," and by not a few other measures. But in itself it is more or less the same—the stirring of the blood as by the sound of a trumpet, or else the melting of the mood into or close ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... slave-holders,—until the people reconquered their rights on the field of battle. Accustomed to despotic power in their own States for more than two generations, and justifying themselves always by divine right, the slave-holders possessed all the self-confidence, pretension, and arrogance of the old French nobility. They were a self-deluded class of men, of all classes the most difficult to deal with, and Sumner was the Mirabeau who faced them at Washington and who pricked the bubble of their Olympian pretensions by a most pitiless exposure of ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... The aspect of the old French town was very different from anything English; whiter, infinitely cleaner; higher and narrower houses, the entrance to most of which seeming to be through a great gateway affording admission into a central court-yard; ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various |
